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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part II)

  I would now like to expand a little on what I stumbled through in part I of my Visual Studio 2010 post and touch on a few other features of VS 2010.  Specifically, I want to generate some code based off of an Entity Framework model and tie it up to an actual data source.  Im not going to take the easy way and tie to a SQL Server data source, though, I will tie it to an XML data file instead.  Why?  Well, why not?  This is purely for learning, there are probably much better ways to get strongly-typed classes around XML but it will force us to go down a path less travelled and maybe learn a few things along the way.  Once we get this XML data and the means to interact with it, I will revisit data binding to this data in a WPF form and see if I cant get reading, adding, deleting, and updating working smoothly with minimal code.  To begin, I will use what was learned in the first part of this blog topic and draw out a data model for the MFL (My Football League) - I dont want the NFL to come down and sue me for using their name in this totally football-related article.  The data model looks as follows, with Teams having Players, and Players having a position and statistics for each season they played: Note that when making the associations between these entities, I was given the option to create the foreign key but I only chose to select this option for the association between Player and Position.  The reason for this is that I am picturing the XML that will contain this data to look somewhat like this: <MFL> <Position/> <Position/> <Position/> <Team>     <Player>         <Statistic/>     </Player> </Team> </MFL> Statistic will be under its associated Player node, and Player will be under its associated Team node no need to have an Id to reference it if we know it will always fall under its parent.  Position, however, is more of a lookup value that will not have any hierarchical relationship to the player.  In fact, the Position data itself may be in a completely different xml file (something Id like to play around with), so in any case, a player will need to reference the position by its Id. So now that we have a simple data model laid out, I would like to generate two things based on it:  A class for each entity with properties corresponding to each entity property An IO class with methods to get data for each entity, either all instances, by Id or by parent. Now my experience with code generation in the past has consisted of writing up little apps that use the code dom directly to regenerate code on demand (or using tools like CodeSmith).  Surely, there has got to be a more fun way to do this given that we are using the Entity Framework which already has built-in code generation for SQL Server support.  Lets start with that built-in stuff to give us a base to work off of.  Right click anywhere in the canvas of our model and select Add Code Generation Item: So just adding that code item seemed to do quite a bit towards what I was intending: It apparently generated a class for each entity, but also a whole ton more.  I mean a TON more.  Way too much complicated code was generated now that code is likely to be a black box anyway so it shouldnt matter, but we need to understand how to make this work the way we want it to work, so lets get ready to do some stumbling through that text template (tt) file. When I open the .tt file that was generated, right off the bat I realize there is going to be trouble there is no color coding, no intellisense no nothing!  That is going to make stumbling through more like groping blindly in the dark while handcuffed and hopping on one foot, which was one of the alternate titles I was considering for this blog.  Thankfully, the community comes to my rescue and I wont have to cast my mind back to the glory days of coding in VI (look it up, kids).  Using the Extension Manager (Available under the Tools menu), I did a quick search for tt editor in the Online Gallery and quickly found the Tangible T4 Editor: Downloading and installing this was a breeze, and after doing so I got some color coding and intellisense while editing the tt files.  If you will be doing any customizing of tt files, I highly recommend installing this extension.  Next, well see if that is enough help for us to tweak that tt file to do the kind of code generation that we wantDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• Use your own domain email and tired of SPAM? SPAMfighter FTW

  - by Dave Campbell

  I wouldn't post this if I hadn't tried it... and I paid for it myself, so don't anybody be thinking I'm reviewing something someone sent me! Long ago and far away I got very tired of local ISPs and 2nd phone lines and took the plunge and got hooked up to cable... yeah I know the 2nd phone line concept may be hard for everyone to understand, but that's how it was in 'the old days'. To avoid having to change email addresses all the time, I decided to buy a domain name, get minimal hosting, and use that for all email into the house. That way if I changed providers, all the email addresses wouldn't have to change. Of course, about a dozen domains later, I have LOTS of pop email addresses and even an exchange address to my client's server... times have changed. What also has changed is the fact that we get SPAM... 'back in the day' when I was a beta tester for the first ISP in Phoenix, someone tried sending an ad to all of us, and what he got in return for his trouble was a bunch of core dumps that locked up his email... if you don't know what a core dump is, ask your grandfather. But in today's world, we're all much more civilized than that, and as with many things, the criminals seem to have much more rights than we do, so we get inundated with email offering all sorts of wild schemes that you'd have to be brain-dead to accept, but yet... if people weren't accepting them, they'd stop sending them. I keep hoping that survival of the smartest would weed out the mental midgets that respond and then the jumk email stop, but that hasn't happened yet anymore than finding high-quality hearing aids at the checkout line of Safeway because of all the dimwits playing music too loud inside their car... but that's another whole topic and I digress. So what's the solution for all the spam? And I mean *all*... on that old personal email address, I am now getting over 150 spam messages a day! Yes I know that's why God invented the delete key, but I took it on as a challenge, and it's a matter of principle... why should I switch email addresses, or convert from [email protected] to something else, or have all my email filtered through some service just because some A-Hole somewhere has a site up trying to phish Ma & Pa Kettle (ask your grandfather about that too) out of their retirement money? Well... I got an email from my cousin the other day while I was writing yet another email rule, and there was a banner on the bottom of his email that said he was protected by SPAMfighter. SPAMfighter huh.... so I took a look at their site, and found yet one more of the supposed tools to help us. But... I read that they're a Microsoft Gold Partner... and that doesn't come lightly... so I took a gamble and here's what I found: I installed it, and had to do a couple things: 1) SPAMfighter stuffed the SPAMfighter folder into my client's exchange address... I deleted it, made a new SPAMfighter folder where I wanted it to go, then in the SPAMfighter Clients settings for Outlook, I told it to put all spam there. 2) It didn't seem to be doing anything. There's a ribbon button that you can select "Block", and I did that, wondering if I was 'training' it, but it wasn't picking up duplicates 3) I sent email to support, and wrote a post on the forum (not to self: reply to that post). By the time the folks from the home office responded, it was the next day, and first up, SPAMfighter knocked down everything that came through when Outlook opend... two thumbs up! I disabled my 'garbage collection' rule from Outlook, and told Outlook not to use the junk folder thinking it was interfering. 4) Day 2 seemed to go about like Day 1... but I hung in there. 5) Day 3 is now a whole new day... I had left Outlook open and hadn't looked at the PC since sometime late yesterday afternoon, and when I looked this morning, *every bit* of spam was in the SPAMfighter folder!! I'm a new paying customer After watching SPAMfighter work this morning, I've purchased a 1-year license, and I now can sit and watch as emails come in and disappear from my inbox into the SPAMfighter folder. No more continual tweaking of the rules. I've got SPAMfighter set to 'Very Hard' filtering... personally I'd rather pull the few real emails out of the SPAMfighter folder than pull spam out of the real folders. Yes this is simply another way of using the delete key, but you know what? ... it feels good :) Here's a screenshot of the stats after just about 48 hours of being onboard: Note that all the ones blocked by me were during Day 1 and 2... I've blocked none today, and everything is blocked. Stay in the 'Light!

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• Modularity through HTTP

  - by Michael Williamson

  As programmers, we strive for modularity in the code we write. We hope that splitting the problem up makes it easier to solve, and allows us to reuse parts of our code in other applications. Object-orientation is the most obvious of many attempts to get us closer to this ideal, and yet one of the most successful approaches is almost accidental: the web. Programming languages provide us with functions and classes, and plenty of other ways to modularize our code. This allows us to take our large problem, split it into small parts, and solve those small parts without having to worry about the whole. It also makes it easier to reason about our code. So far, so good, but now that we’ve written our small, independent module, for example to send out e-mails to my customers, we’d like to reuse it in another application. By creating DLLs, JARs or our platform’s package container of choice, we can do just that – provided our new application is on the same platform. Want to use a Java library from C#? Well, good luck – it might be possible, but it’s not going to be smooth sailing. Even if a library exists, it doesn’t mean that using it going to be a pleasant experience. Say I want to use Java to write out an XML document to an output stream. You’d imagine this would be a simple one-liner. You’d be wrong: import org.w3c.dom.*; import java.io.*; import javax.xml.transform.*; import javax.xml.transform.dom.*; import javax.xml.transform.stream.*; private static final void writeDoc(Document doc, OutputStream out) throws IOException { try { Transformer t = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(); t.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.DOCTYPE_SYSTEM, doc.getDoctype().getSystemId()); t.transform(new DOMSource(doc), new StreamResult(out)); } catch (TransformerException e) { throw new AssertionError(e); // Can't happen! } } Most of the time, there is a good chance somebody else has written the code before, but if nobody can understand the interface to that code, nobody’s going to use it. The result is that most of the code we write is just a variation on a theme. Despite our best efforts, we’ve fallen a little short of our ideal, but the web brings us closer. If we want to send e-mails to our customers, we could write an e-mail-sending library. More likely, we’d use an existing one for our language. Even then, we probably wouldn’t have niceties like A/B testing or DKIM signing. Alternatively, we could just fire some HTTP requests at MailChimp, and get a whole slew of features without getting anywhere near the code that implements them. The web is inherently language agnostic. So long as your language can send and receive text over HTTP, and probably parse some JSON, you’re about as well equipped as anybody. Instead of building libraries for a specific language, we can build a service that almost every language can reuse. The text-based nature of HTTP also helps to limit the complexity of the API. As SOAP will attest, you can still make a horrible mess using HTTP, but at least it is an obvious horrible mess. Complex data structures are tedious to marshal to and from text, providing a strong incentive to keep things simple. By contrast, spotting the complexities in a class hierarchy is often not as easy. HTTP doesn’t solve every problem. It probably isn’t such a good idea to use it inside an inner loop that’s executed thousands of times per second. What’s more, the HTTP approach might introduce some new problems. We often need to add a thin shim to each application that we wish to communicate over HTTP. For instance, we might need to write a small plugin in PHP if we want to integrate WordPress into our system. Suddenly, instead of a system written in one language, we’re maintaining a system with several distinct languages and platforms. Even then, we should strive to avoid re-implementing the same old thing. As programmers, we consistently underestimate both the cost of building a system and the ongoing maintenance. If we allow ourselves to integrate existing applications, even if they’re in unfamiliar languages, we save ourselves those development and maintenance costs, as well as being able to pick the best solution for our problem. Thanks to the web, HTTP is often the easiest way to get there.

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• UppercuT v1.0 and 1.1&ndash;Linux (Mono), Multi-targeting, SemVer, Nitriq and Obfuscation, oh my!

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Recently UppercuT (UC) quietly released version 1 (in August). I’m pretty happy with where we are, although I think it’s a few months later than I originally planned. I’m glad I held it back, it gave me some more time to think about some things a little more and also the opportunity to receive a patch for running builds with UC on Linux. We also released v1.1 very recently (December). UppercuT v1 Builds On Linux Perhaps the most significant changes to UC going v1 is that it now supports builds on Linux using Mono! This is thanks mostly to Svein Ackenhausen for the patches and working with me on getting it all working while not breaking the windows builds!  This means you can use mono on Windows or Linux. Notice the shell files to execute with Linux that come as part of UC now. Multi-Targeting Perhaps one of the hardest things to do that requires an automated build is multi-targeting. At v1 this is early, and possibly prone to some issues, but available.  We believe in making everything stupid simple, so it’s as simple as adding a comma to the microsoft.framework property. i.e. “net-3.5, net-4.0” to suddenly produce both framework builds. When you build, this is what you get (if you meet each framework’s requirements): At this time you have to let UC override the build location (as it does by default) or this will not work.  Semantic Versioning By now many of you have been using UppercuT for awhile and have watched how we have done versioning. Many of you who use git already know we put the revision hash in the informational/product version as the last octet. At v1, UppercuT has adopted the semantic versioning scheme. What does that mean? This is a short read, but a good one: http://SemVer.org SemVer (Semantic Versioning) is really using versioning what it was meant for. You have three octets. Major.Minor.Patch as in 1.1.0.  UC will use three different versioning concepts, one for the assembly version, one for the file version, and one for the product version. All versions - The first three octects of the version are owned by SemVer. Major.Minor.Patch i.e.: 1.1.0 Assembly Version - The assembly version would much closer follow SemVer. Last digit is always 0. Major.Minor.Patch.0 i.e: 1.1.0.0 File Version - The file version occupies the build number as the last digit. Major.Minor.Patch.Build i.e.: 1.1.0.2650 Product/Informational Version - The last octect of your product/informational version is the source control revision/hash. Major.Minor.Patch.RevisionOrHash i.e. (TFS/SVN): 1.1.0.235 i.e. (Git/HG): 1.1.0.a45ace4346adef0 SemVer is not on by default, the passive versioning scheme is still in effect. Notice that version.use_semanticversioning has been added to the UppercuT.config file (and version.patch in support of the third octet): Gems Support Gems support was added at v1. This will probably be deprecated as some point once there is an announced sunset for Nu v1. Application gems may keep it around since there is no alternative for that yet though (CoApp would be a possible replacement). Nitriq Support Nitriq is a code analysis tool like NDepend. It’s built by Mr. Jon von Gillern. It uses LINQ query language, so you can use a familiar idiom when analyzing your code base. It’s a pretty awesome tool that has a free version for those looking to do code analysis! To use Nitriq with UC, you are going to need the console edition.  To take advantage of Nitriq, you just need to update the location of Nitriq in the config: Then add the nitriq project files at the root of your source. Please refer to the Nitriq documentation on how these are created. UppercuT v1.1 Obfuscation One thing I started looking into was an easy way to obfuscate my code. I came across EazFuscator, which is both free and awesome. Plus the GUI for it is super simple to use. How do you make obfuscation even easier? Make it a convention and a configurable property in the UC config file! And the code gets obfuscated! Closing Definitely get out and look at the new release. It contains lots of chocolaty (sp?) goodness. And remember, the upgrade path is almost as simple as drag and drop!

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• How to handle updated configuration when it's already been cloned for editing

  - by alexrussell

  Really sorry about the title that probably doesn't make much sense. Hopefully I can explain myself better here as it's something that's kinda bugged me for ages, and is now becoming a pressing concern as I write a bit of software with configuration. Most software comes with default configuration options stored in the app itself, and then there's a configuration file (let's say) that a user can edit. Once created/edited for the first time, subsequent updates to the application can not (easily) modify this configuration file for fear of clobbering the user's own changes to the default configuration. So my question is, if my application adds a new configurable parameter, what's the best way to aid discoverability of the setting and allow the user (developer) to override it as nicely as possible given the following constraints: I actually don't have a canonical default config in the application per se, it's more of a 'cascading filesystem'-like affair - the config template is stored in default/config.json and when the user wishes to edit the configuration, it's copied to user/config.json. If a user config is found it is used - there is no automatic overriding of a subset of keys, the whole new file is used and that's that. If there's no user config the default config is used. When a user wishes to edit the config they run a command to 'generate' it for them (which simply copies the config.json file from the default to the user directory). There is no UI for the configuration options as it's not appropriate to the userbase (think of my software as a library or something, the users are developers, the config is done in the user/config.json file). Due to my software being library-like there's no simple way to, on updating of the software, run some tasks automatically (so any ideas of look at the current config, compare to template config, add ing missing keys) aren't appropriate. The only solution I can think of right now is to say "there's a new config setting X" in release notes, but this doesn't seem ideal to me. If you want any more information let me know. The above specifics are not actually 100% true to my situation, but they represent the problem equally well with lower complexity. If you do want specifics, however, I can explain the exact setup. Further clarification of the type of configuration I mean: think of the Atom code editor. There appears to be a default 'template' config file somewhere, but as soon as a configuration option is edited ~/.atom/config.cson is generated and the setting goes in there. From now on is Atom is updated and gets a new configuration key, this file cannot be overwritten by Atom without a lot of effort to ensure that the addition/modification of the key does not clobber. In Atom's case, because there is a GUI for editing settings, they can get away with just adding the UI for the new setting into the UI to aid 'discoverability' of the new setting. I don't have that luxury. Clarification of my constraints and what I'm actually looking for: The software I'm writing is actually a package for a larger system. This larger system is what provides the configuration, and the way it works is kinda fixed - I just do a config('some.key') kinda call and it knows to look to see if the user has a config clone and if so use it, otherwise use the default config which is part of my package. Now, while I could make my application edit the user's configuration files (there is a convention about where they're stored), it's generally not done, so I'd like to live with the constraints of the system I'm using if possible. And it's not just about discoverability either, one large concern is that the addition of a configuration key won't actually work as soon as the user has their own copy of the original template. Adding the key to the template won't make a difference as that file is never read. As such, I think this is actually quite a big flaw in the design of the configuration cascading system and thus needs to be taken up with my upstream. So, thinking about it, based on my constraints, I don't think there's going to be a good solution save for either editing the user's configuration or using a new config file every time there are updates to the default configuration. Even the release notes idea from above isn't doable as, if the user does not follow the advice, suddenly I have a config key with no value (user-defined or default). So the new question is this: what is the general way to solve the problem of having a default configuration in template config files and allowing a user to make user-specific version of these in order to override the defaults? A per-key cascade (rather than per-file cascade) where the user only specifies their overrides? In this case, what happens if a configuration value is an array - do we replace or append to the default (or, more realistically, how does the user specify whether they wish to replace or append to)? It seems like configuration is kinda hard, so how is it solved in the wild?

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• Most efficient way to implement delta time

  - by Starkers

  Here's one way to implement delta time: /// init /// var duration = 5000, currentTime = Date.now(); // and create cube, scene, camera ect ////// function animate() { /// determine delta /// var now = Date.now(), deltat = now - currentTime, currentTime = now, scalar = deltat / duration, angle = (Math.PI * 2) * scalar; ////// /// animate /// cube.rotation.y += angle; ////// /// update /// requestAnimationFrame(render); ////// } Could someone confirm I know how it works? Here what I think is going on: Firstly, we set duration at 5000, which how long the loop will take to complete in an ideal world. With a computer that is slow/busy, let's say the animation loop takes twice as long as it should, so 10000: When this happens, the scalar is set to 2.0: scalar = deltat / duration scalar = 10000 / 5000 scalar = 2.0 We now times all animation by twice as much: angle = (Math.PI * 2) * scalar; angle = (Math.PI * 2) * 2.0; angle = (Math.PI * 4) // which is 2 rotations When we do this, the cube rotation will appear to 'jump', but this is good because the animation remains real-time. With a computer that is going too quickly, let's say the animation loop takes half as long as it should, so 2500: When this happens, the scalar is set to 0.5: scalar = deltat / duration scalar = 2500 / 5000 scalar = 0.5 We now times all animation by a half: angle = (Math.PI * 2) * scalar; angle = (Math.PI * 2) * 0.5; angle = (Math.PI * 1) // which is half a rotation When we do this, the cube won't jump at all, and the animation remains real time, and doesn't speed up. However, would I be right in thinking this doesn't alter how hard the computer is working? I mean it still goes through the loop as fast as it can, and it still has render the whole scene, just with different smaller angles! So this a bad way to implement delta time, right? Now let's pretend the computer is taking exactly as long as it should, so 5000: When this happens, the scalar is set to 1.0: angle = (Math.PI * 2) * scalar; angle = (Math.PI * 2) * 1; angle = (Math.PI * 2) // which is 1 rotation When we do this, everything is timsed by 1, so nothing is changed. We'd get the same result if we weren't using delta time at all! My questions are as follows Mostly importantly, have I got the right end of the stick here? How do we know to set the duration to 5000 ? Or can it be any number? I'm a bit vague about the "computer going too quickly". Is there a way loop less often rather than reduce the animation steps? Seems like a better idea. Using this method, do all of our animations need to be timesed by the scalar? Do we have to hunt down every last one and times it? Is this the best way to implement delta time? I think not, due to the fact the computer can go nuts and all we do is divide each animation step and because we need to hunt down every step and times it by the scalar. Not a very nice DSL, as it were. So what is the best way to implement delta time? Below is one way that I do not really get but may be a better way to implement delta time. Could someone explain please? // Globals INV_MAX_FPS = 1 / 60; frameDelta = 0; clock = new THREE.Clock(); // In the animation loop (the requestAnimationFrame callback)… frameDelta += clock.getDelta(); // API: "Get the seconds passed since the last call to this method." while (frameDelta >= INV_MAX_FPS) { update(INV_MAX_FPS); // calculate physics frameDelta -= INV_MAX_FPS; } How I think this works: Firstly we set INV_MAX_FPS to 0.01666666666 How we will use this number number does not jump out at me. We then intialize a frameDelta which stores how long the last loop took to run. Come the first loop frameDelta is not greater than INV_MAX_FPS so the loop is not run (0 = 0.01666666666). So nothing happens. Now I really don't know what would cause this to happen, but let's pretend that the loop we just went through took 2 seconds to complete: We set frameDelta to 2: frameDelta += clock.getDelta(); frameDelta += 2.00 Now we run an animation thanks to update(0.01666666666). Again what is relevance of 0.01666666666?? And then we take away 0.01666666666 from the frameDelta: frameDelta -= INV_MAX_FPS; frameDelta = frameDelta - INV_MAX_FPS; frameDelta = 2 - 0.01666666666 frameDelta = 1.98333333334 So let's go into the second loop. Let's say it took 2(? Why not 2? Or 12? I am a bit confused): frameDelta += clock.getDelta(); frameDelta = frameDelta + clock.getDelta(); frameDelta = 1.98333333334 + 2 frameDelta = 3.98333333334 This time we enter the while loop because 3.98333333334 = 0.01666666666 We run update We take away 0.01666666666 from frameDelta again: frameDelta -= INV_MAX_FPS; frameDelta = frameDelta - INV_MAX_FPS; frameDelta = 3.98333333334 - 0.01666666666 frameDelta = 3.96666666668 Now let's pretend the loop is super quick and runs in just 0.1 seconds and continues to do this. (Because the computer isn't busy any more). Basically, the update function will be run, and every loop we take away 0.01666666666 from the frameDelta untill the frameDelta is less than 0.01666666666. And then nothing happens until the computer runs slowly again? Could someone shed some light please? Does the update() update the scalar or something like that and we still have to times everything by the scalar like in the first example?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 29, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, September 29, 2013Popular ReleasesAudioWordsDownloader: AudioWordsDownloader 1.1 build 88: New features -------- list of words (mp3 files) is available upon typing when a download path is defined list of download paths is added paths history settings added Bug fixed ----- case mismatch in word search field fixed path not exist bug fixed when history has been used path, when filled from dialog, not stored refresh autocomplete list after path change word sought is deleted when path is changed at the end sought word list is deleted word list not refreshed download end...Activity Viewer 2012: Activity Viewer 2012 V 5.0.0.3: Planning to add new features: 1. Import/Export rules 2. Tabular mode multi servers connections.Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Alpha 0.8.3.0: Version 0.8.3.0 emphasis on the FIlteredStream and ease how to manage Exceptions that can occur due to the network or any other issue you might encounter. Will be available through nuget the 29/09/2013. FilteredStream Features provided by the Twitter Stream API - Ability to track specific keywords - Ability to track specific users - Ability to track specific locations Additional features - Detect the reasons the tweet has been retrieved from the Filtered API. You have access to both the ma...AcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.5: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.5 ???? AcPlay????????v3.5 ????????，???????????30% ?? ???????GoodManga.net???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??Acfun?????????? ??Bilibili??????????? ?????????flvcd???????? ??SfAcg????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ????32...OfflineBrowser: Release v1.2: This release includes some multi-threading support, a better progress bar, more JavaScript fixes, and a help system. This release is also portable (can run with no issues from a flash drive).CtrlAltStudio Viewer: CtrlAltStudio Viewer 1.0.0.34288 Release: This release of the CtrlAltStudio Viewer includes the following significant features: Stereoscopic 3D display support. Based on Firestorm viewer 4.4.2 codebase. For more details, see the release notes linked to below. Release notes: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/release-notes/1-0-0-34288-release Support info: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/support Privacy policy: http://ctrlaltstudio.com/viewer/privacy Disclaimer: This software is not provided or supported by Linden Lab, the makers of ...CrmSvcUtil Generate Attribute Constants: Generate Attribute Constants (1.0.5018.28159): Built against version 5.0.15 of the CRM SDK Fixed issue where constant for primary key attribute was being duplicated in all entity classes Added ability to override base class for entity classesC# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.6.0: Added support for classless scripts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.CS-Script for Notepad++: Release v1.0.6.0: Added support for classless scripts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.SimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.02: SourceCode and SampleMagick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.7.001: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.7.0. Breaking changes: - ToBitmap method of MagickImage returns a png instead of a bmp. - Changed the value for full transparency from 255(Q8)/65535(Q16) to 0. - MagickColor now uses floats instead of Byte/UInt16.Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.578b: With the feedback received over the renaming of Movie Folders, and files, there has been some refinement done. As well as I would like to introduce Blu-Ray movie folder support, for Pre-Frodo and Frodo onwards versions of XBMC. To start with, Context menu option for renaming movies, now has three sub options: Movie & Folder, Movie only & Folder only. The option Manual Movie Rename needs to be selected from Movie Preferences, but the autoscrape boxes do not need to be selected. Blu Ray Fo...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen v2.1.3.api release: This is for the brave at heart, this is the maint release to update to the new movie api. please send feedback on fix requests.FFXIV Crafting Simulator: Crafting Simulator 2.3: - Major refactoring of the code behind. - Added a current durability and a current CP textbox.DNN CMS Platform: 07.01.02: Major HighlightsAdded the ability to manage the Vanity URL prefix Added the ability to filter members in the member directory by role Fixed issue where the user could inadvertently click the login button multiple times Fixed issues where core classes could not be used in out of process cache provider Fixed issue where profile visibility submenu was not displayed correctly Fixed issue where the member directory was broken when Convert URL to lowercase setting was enabled Fixed issu...Rawr: Rawr 5.4.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Sample MVC4 EF Codefirst Architecture: RazMVCWebApp ver 1.1: Signal R sample is added.CODE Framework: 4.0.30923.0: See change notes in the documentation section for details on what's new. Note: If you download the class reference help file with, you have to right-click the file, pick "Properties", and then unblock the file, as many browsers flag the file as blocked during download (for security reasons) and thus hides all content.JayData -The unified data access library for JavaScript: JayData 1.3.2 - Indian Summer Edition: JayData is a unified data access library for JavaScript to CRUD + Query data from different sources like WebAPI, OData, MongoDB, WebSQL, SQLite, HTML5 localStorage, Facebook or YQL. The library can be integrated with KendoUI, Angular.js, Knockout.js or Sencha Touch 2 and can be used on Node.js as well. See it in action in this 6 minutes video KendoUI examples: JayData example site Examples for map integration JayData example site What's new in JayData 1.3.2 - Indian Summer Edition For detai...ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.12.0.0: sync with rev. 2892 of the java version new PDF417 decoder improved Aztec decoder global speed improvements direct Kinect support for ColorImageFrame better Structured Append support many other small bug fixes and improvementsNew ProjectsCACHEDB: CLIENT-DATABASE || CLIENT_CACHEDB-DATABASEClassic WiX Burn Theme: A WiX Burn theme inspired by the classic WiX wizard user interface.CryptStr.Fody: A post-build weaver that encrypts literal strings in your .NET assemblies without breaking ClickOnce.Easy Code: A setting framework.EduSoft: This is a school eg.GameStuff: GameStuff is a library of Physics and Geometrics concepts for video game. Nekora Test Project: Nekora test projectPopCorn Console Game: Simple console gameRadioController: This project started from people installing Tablets in Mustangs. You would typically loose most control of the radio. This projects brings that back!Random searcher i pochodne: Wyszukiwarka plików multimedialnych i czego dusza zapragnie.SporkRandom: A .NET (C#, Visual Basic) interface for the true random number generator service of random.org

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• Knowing your user is key--Part 1: Motivation

  - by erikanollwebb

  I was thinking where the best place to start in this blog would be and finally came back to a theme that I think is pretty critical--successful gamification in the enterprise comes down to knowing your user.  Lots of folks will say that gamification is about understanding that everyone is a gamer.  But at least in my org, that argument won't play for a lot of people.  Pun intentional.  It's not that I don't see the attraction to the idea--really, very few people play no games at all.  If they don't play video games, they might play solitaire on their computer.  They may play card games, or some type of sport.  Mario Herger has some great facts on how much game playing there is going on at his Enterprise-Gamification.com website. But at the end of the day, I can't sell that into my organization well.  We are Oracle.  We make big, serious software designed run your whole business.  We don't make Angry Birds out of your financial reporting tools.  So I stick with the argument that works better.  Gamification techniques are really just good principals of user experience packaged a little differently.  Feedback?  We already know feedback is important when using software.  Progress indicators?  Got that too.  Game mechanics may package things in a more explicit way but it's not really "new".  To know how to use game mechanics, and what a user experience team is important for, is totally understanding who our users are and what they are motivated by. For several years, I taught college psychology courses, including Motivation.  Motivation is generally broken down into intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.  There's intrinsic, which comes from within the individual.  And there's extrinsic, which comes from outside the individual.  Intrinsic motivation is that motivation that comes from just a general sense of pleasure in the doing of something.  For example, I like to cook.  I like to cook a lot.  The kind of cooking I think is just fun makes other people--people who don't like to cook--cringe.  Like the cake I made this week--the star-spangled rhapsody from The Cake Bible: two layers of meringue, two layers of genoise flavored with a raspberry eau de vie syrup, whipped cream with berries and a mousseline buttercream, also flavored with raspberry liqueur and topped with fresh raspberries and blueberries. I love cooking--I ask for cooking tools for my birthday and Christmas, I take classes like sushi making and knife skills for fun.  I like reading about you can make an emulsion of egg yolks, melted butter and lemon, cook slowly and transform them into a sauce hollandaise (my use of all the egg yolks that didn't go into the aforementioned cake).  And while it's nice when people like what I cook, I don't do it for that.  I do it because I think it's fun.  My former boss, Ultan Ó Broin, loves to fish in the sea off the coast of Ireland.  Not because he gets prizes for it, or awards, but because it's fun.  To quote a note he sent me today when I asked if having been recently ill kept him from the beginning of mackerel season, he told me he had already been out and said "I can fish when on a deathbed" (read more of Ultan's work, see his blogs on User Assistance and Translation.). That's not the kind of intensity you get about something you don't like to do.  I'm sure you can think of something you do just because you like it. So how does that relate to gamification?  Gamification in the enterprise space is about uncovering the game within work.  Gamification is about tapping into things people already find motivating.  But to do that, you need to know what that user is motivated by. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those areas where over-the-top gamification seems to work (not to plug a competitor in this space, but you can search on what Bunchball* has done with a company just a little north of us on 101 for the CRM crowd).  Sales people are naturally competitive and thrive on that plus recognition of their sales work.  You can use lots of game mechanics like leaderboards and challenges and scorecards with this type of user and they love it.  Show my whole org I'm leading in sales for the quarter?  Bring it on!  However, take the average accountant and show how much general ledger activity they have done in the last week and expose it to their whole org on a leaderboard and I think you'd see a lot of people looking for a new job.  Why?  Because in general, accountants aren't extraverts who thrive on competition in their work.  That doesn't mean there aren't game mechanics that would work for them, but they won't be the same game mechanics that work for sales people.  It's a different type of user and they are motivated by different things. To break this up, I'll stop here and post now.  I'll pick this thread up in the next post. Thoughts? Questions? *Disclosure: To my knowledge, Oracle has no relationship with Bunchball at this point in time.

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• YouTube Scalability Lessons

  - by Bertrand Matthelié

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Calibri"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }h2 { margin: 12pt 0cm 3pt; page-break-after: avoid; font-size: 14pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-style: italic; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }span.Heading2Char { font-family: Calibri; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Very interesting blog post by Todd Hoff at highscalability.com presenting “7 Years of YouTube Scalability Lessons in 30 min” based on a presentation from Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube: …. The key takeaway away of the talk for me was doing a lot with really simple tools. While many teams are moving on to more complex ecosystems, YouTube really does keep it simple. They program primarily in Python, use MySQL as their database, they’ve stuck with Apache, and even new features for such a massive site start as a very simple Python program. That doesn’t mean YouTube doesn’t do cool stuff, they do, but what makes everything work together is more a philosophy or a way of doing things than technological hocus pocus. What made YouTube into one of the world’s largest websites? Read on and see... Stats @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } 4 billion Views a day 60 hours of video is uploaded every minute 350+ million devices are YouTube enabled Revenue double in 2010 The number of videos has gone up 9 orders of magnitude and the number of developers has only gone up two orders of magnitude. 1 million lines of Python code Stack @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Python - most of the lines of code for YouTube are still in Python. Everytime you watch a YouTube video you are executing a bunch of Python code. Apache - when you think you need to get rid of it, you don’t. Apache is a real rockstar technology at YouTube because they keep it simple. Every request goes through Apache. Linux - the benefit of Linux is there’s always a way to get in and see how your system is behaving. No matter how bad your app is behaving, you can take a look at it with Linux tools like strace and tcpdump. MySQL - is used a lot. When you watch a video you are getting data from MySQL. Sometime it’s used a relational database or a blob store. It’s about tuning and making choices about how you organize your data. Vitess- a  new project released by YouTube, written in Go, it’s a frontend to MySQL. It does a lot of optimization on the fly, it rewrites queries and acts as a proxy. Currently it serves every YouTube database request. It’s RPC based. Zookeeper - a distributed lock server. It’s used for configuration. Really interesting piece of technology. Hard to use correctly so read the manual Wiseguy - a CGI servlet container. Spitfire - a templating system. It has an abstract syntax tree that let’s them do transformations to make things go faster. Serialization formats - no matter which one you use, they are all expensive. Measure. Don’t use pickle. Not a good choice. Found protocol buffers slow. They wrote their own BSON implementation, which is 10-15 time faster than the one you can download. ...Contiues. Read the blog Watch the video

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• The Unintended Consequences of Sound Security Policy

  - by Tanu Sood

  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 EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Author: Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM Meet the Author: Kevin Moulton, Senior Sales Consulting Manager, Oracle Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM, has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East Enterprise Security Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. When I speak to a room of IT administrators, I like to begin by asking them if they have implemented a complex password policy. Generally, they all nod their heads enthusiastically. I ask them if that password policy requires long passwords. More nodding. I ask if that policy requires upper and lower case letters – faster nodding – numbers – even faster – special characters – enthusiastic nodding all around! I then ask them if their policy also includes a requirement for users to regularly change their passwords. Now we have smiles with the nodding! I ask them if the users have different IDs and passwords on the many systems that they have access to. Of course! I then ask them if, when they walk around the building, they see something like this: Thanks to Jake Ludington for the nice example. Can these administrators be faulted for their policies? Probably not but, in the end, end-users will find a way to get their job done efficiently. Post-It Notes to the rescue! I was visiting a business in New York City one day which was a perfect example of this problem. First I walked up to the security desk and told them where I was headed. They asked me if they should call upstairs to have someone escort me. Is that my call? Is that policy? I said that I knew where I was going, so they let me go. Having the conference room number handy, I wandered around the place in a search of my destination. As I walked around, unescorted, I noticed the post-it note problem in abundance. Had I been so inclined, I could have logged in on almost any machine and into any number of systems. When I reached my intended conference room, I mentioned my post-it note observation to the two gentlemen with whom I was meeting. One of them said, “You mean like this,” and he produced a post it note full of login IDs and passwords from his breast pocket! I gave him kudos for not hanging the list on his monitor. We then talked for the rest of the meeting about the difficulties faced by the employees due to the security policies. These policies, although well-intended, made life very difficult for the end-users. Most users had access to 8 to 12 systems, and the passwords for each expired at a different times. The post-it note solution was understandable. Who could remember even half of them? What could this customer have done differently? I am a fan of using a provisioning system, such as Oracle Identity Manager, to manage all of the target systems. With OIM, and email could be automatically sent to all users when it was time to change their password. The end-users would follow a link to change their password on a web page, and then OIM would propagate that password out to all of the systems that the user had access to, even if the login IDs were different. Another option would be an Enterprise Single-Sign On Solution. With Oracle eSSO, all of a user’s credentials would be stored in a central, encrypted credential store. The end-user would only have to login to their machine each morning and then, as they moved to each new system, Oracle eSSO would supply the credentials. Good-bye post-it notes! 3M may be disappointed, but your end users will thank you. I hear people say that this post-it note problem is not a big deal, because the only people who would see the passwords are fellow employees. Do you really know who is walking around your building? What are the password policies in your business? How do the end-users respond?

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• MERGE gives better OUTPUT options

  - by Rob Farley

  MERGE is very cool. There are a ton of useful things about it – mostly around the fact that you can implement a ton of change against a table all at once. This is great for data warehousing, handling changes made to relational databases by applications, all kinds of things. One of the more subtle things about MERGE is the power of the OUTPUT clause. Useful for logging.   If you’re not familiar with the OUTPUT clause, you really should be – it basically makes your DML (INSERT/DELETE/UPDATE/MERGE) statement return data back to you. This is a great way of returning identity values from INSERT commands (so much better than SCOPE_IDENTITY() or the older (and worse) @@IDENTITY, because you can get lots of rows back). You can even use it to grab default values that are set using non-deterministic functions like NEWID() – things you couldn’t normally get back without running another query (or with a trigger, I guess, but that’s not pretty). That inserted table I referenced – that’s part of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ work that goes on with all DML changes. When you insert data, this internal table called inserted gets populated with rows, and then used to inflict the appropriate inserts on the various structures that store data (HoBTs – the Heaps or B-Trees used to store data as tables and indexes). When deleting, the deleted table gets populated. Updates get a matching row in both tables (although this doesn’t mean that an update is a delete followed by an inserted, it’s just the way it’s handled with these tables). These tables can be referenced by the OUTPUT clause, which can show you the before and after for any DML statement. Useful stuff. MERGE is slightly different though. With MERGE, you get a mix of entries. Your MERGE statement might be doing some INSERTs, some UPDATEs and some DELETEs. One of the most common examples of MERGE is to perform an UPSERT command, where data is updated if it already exists, or inserted if it’s new. And in a single operation too. Here, you can see the usefulness of the deleted and inserted tables, which clearly reflect the type of operation (but then again, MERGE lets you use an extra column called $action to show this). (Don’t worry about the fact that I turned on IDENTITY_INSERT, that’s just so that I could insert the values) One of the things I love about MERGE is that it feels almost cursor-like – the UPDATE bit feels like “WHERE CURRENT OF …”, and the INSERT bit feels like a single-row insert. And it is – but into the inserted and deleted tables. The operations to maintain the HoBTs are still done using the whole set of changes, which is very cool. And $action – very convenient. But as cool as $action is, that’s not the point of my post. If it were, I hope you’d all be disappointed, as you can’t really go near the MERGE statement without learning about it. The subtle thing that I love about MERGE with OUTPUT is that you can hook into more than just inserted and deleted. Did you notice in my earlier query that my source table had a ‘src’ field, that wasn’t used in the insert? Normally, this would be somewhat pointless to include in my source query. But with MERGE, I can put that in the OUTPUT clause. This is useful stuff, particularly when you’re needing to audit the changes. Suppose your query involved consolidating data from a number of sources, but you didn’t need to insert that into the actual table, just into a table for audit. This is now very doable, either using the INTO clause of OUTPUT, or surrounding the whole MERGE statement in brackets (parentheses if you’re American) and using a regular INSERT statement. This is also doable if you’re using MERGE to just do INSERTs. In case you hadn’t realised, you can use MERGE in place of an INSERT statement. It’s just like the UPSERT-style statement we’ve just seen, except that we want nothing to match. That’s easy to do, we just use ON 1=2. This is obviously more convoluted than a straight INSERT. And it’s slightly more effort for the database engine too. But, if you want the extra audit capabilities, the ability to hook into the other source columns is definitely useful. Oh, and before people ask if you can also hook into the target table’s columns... Yes, of course. That’s what deleted and inserted give you.

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• Gamification = -10#/3mo

  - by erikanollwebb

  One of the purposes of gamification of anything is to see if you can modify the behavior of the user. In the enterprise, that might mean getting sales people to enter more information into a CRM system, encouraging employees to update their HR records, motivating people to participate in forums and discussions, or process invoices more quickly.  Wikipedia defines behavior modification as "the traditional term for the use of empirically demonstrated behavior change techniques to increase or decrease the frequency of behaviors, such as altering an individual's behaviors and reactions to stimuli through positive and negative reinforcement of adaptive behavior and/or the reduction of behavior through its extinction, punishment and/or satiation."  Gamification is just a way to modify someone's behavior using game mechanics. And the magic question is always whether it works. So I thought I would present my own little experiment from the last few months.  This spring, I upgraded to a Samsung Galaxy 4.  It's a pretty sweet phone in many ways, but one of the little extras I discovered was a built in app called S Health. S Health is an app that you can use to track calories, weight, exercise and it has a built in pedometer. I looked at it when I got the phone, but assumed you had to turn it on to use it so I didn't look at it much.  But sometime in July, I realized that in fact, it just ran in the background and was quietly tracking my steps, with a goal of 10,000 per day.  10,000 steps per day is this magic number recommended by the Surgeon General and the American Heart Association.  Dr. Oz pushes it as the goal for daily exercise.  It's about 5 miles of walking. I'm generally not the kind of person who always has my phone with me.  I leave it in my purse and pull it out when I need it.  But then I realized that meant I wasn't getting a good measure of my steps.  I decided to do a little experiment, and carry it with me as much as possible for a week.  That's when I discovered the gamification that changed my life over the last 3 months.  When I hit 10,000 steps, the app jingled out a little "success!" tune and I got a badge.  I was hooked.  I started carrying my phone.  I started making sure I had shoes I could walk in with me.  I started walking at lunch time, because I realized how often I sat at my desk for 8-10 hours every day without moving.  I started pestering my husband to walk with me after work because I hadn't hit my 10,000 yet, leading him at one point to say "I'm not as much a slave to that badge as you are!"  I started looking at parking lots differently.  Can't get a space up close?  No worries, just that many steps toward my 10,000.  I even tried to see if there was a second power user level at 15,000 or 20,000 (*sadly, no).  If I was close at the end of the day, I have done laps around my house until I got my badge.  I have walked around the block one more time to get my badge.  I have mentally chastised myself when I forgot to put my phone in my pocket because I don't know how many steps I got.  The badge below I got when my boss and I were in New York City and we walked around the block of our hotel just to watch the badge pop up. There are a bunch of tools out on the market now that have similar ideas for helping you to track your exercise, make it social.  There are apps (my favorite is still Zombies, Run!).  You could buy a FitBit or UP by Jawbone.   Interactive fitness makes the Expresso stationary bike with built in video games.  All designed to help you be more aware of your activity and keep you engaged and motivated.  And the idea is to help you change your behavior. I know someone who would spend extra time and work hard on the Expresso because he had built up strategies for how to kill the most dragons while he was riding to get more points.  When the machine broke down, he didn't ride a different bike because it just wasn't that interesting. But for me, just the simple jingle and badge have been all I needed.  I admit, I still giggle gleefully when I hear the tune sing out from my pocket. After a few weeks, I noticed I had dropped a few pounds.  Not a lot, just 2-3.  But then I was really hooked.  I started making a point both to eat a little less and hit 10,000 steps as much as I could.  I bemoaned that during the floods in Boulder, I wasn't hitting my 10,000 steps.  And now, a few months later, I'm almost 10 lbs lighter. All for 1 badge a day. So yes, simple gamification can increase motivation and engagement.  And that can lead to changes in behavior.  Now the job is to apply that to the enterprise space in a meaningful and engaging way. 

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• PanelGridLayout - A Layout Revolution

  - by Duncan Mills

  With the most recent 11.1.2 patchset (11.1.2.3) there has been a lot of excitement around ADF Essentials (and rightly so), however, in all the fuss I didn't want an even more significant change to get missed - yes you read that correctly, a more significant change! I'm talking about the new panelGridLayout component, I can confidently say that this one of the most revolutionary components that we've introduced in 11g, even though it sounds rather boring. To be totally accurate, panelGrid was introduced in 11.1.2.2 but without any presence in the component palette or other design time support, so it was largely missed unless you read the release notes. However in this latest patchset it's finally front and center. Its time to explore - we (really) need to talk about layout.  Let's face it,with ADF Faces rich client, layout is a rather arcane pursuit, once you are a layout master, all bow before you, but it's more of an art than a science, and it is often, in fact, way too difficult to achieve what should (apparently) be a pretty simple. Here's a great example, it's a homework assignment I set for folks I'm teaching this stuff to:  The requirements for this layout are: The header is 80px high, the footer is 30px. These are both fixed.  The first section of the header containing the logo is 180px wide The logo is centered within the top left hand corner of the header  The title text is start aligned in the center zone of the header and will wrap if the browser window is narrowed. It should be aligned in the center of the vertical space  The about link is anchored to the right hand side of the browser with a 20px gap and again is center aligned vertically. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. The footer has a right aligned copyright statement, again middle aligned within a 30px high footer region and with a 20px buffer to the right hand edge. It will move as the browser window is reduced in width. All remaining space is given to a central zone, which, in this case contains a panelSplitter. Expect that at some point in time you'll need a separate messages line in the center of the footer.  In the homework assigment I set I also stipulate that no inlineStyles can be used to control alignment or margins and no use of other taglibs (e.g. JSF HTML or Trinidad HTML). So, if we take this purist approach, that basic page layout (in my stock solution) requires 3 panelStretchLayouts, 5 panelGroupLayouts and 4 spacers - not including the spacer I use for the logo and the contents of the central zone splitter - phew! The point is that even a seemingly simple layout needs a bit of thinking about, particulatly when you consider strechting and browser re-size behavior. In fact, this little sample actually teaches you much of what you need to know to become vaguely competant at layouts in the framework. The underlying result of "the way things are" is that most of us reach for panelStretchLayout before even finishing the first sip of coffee as we embark on a new page design. In fact most pages you will see in any moderately complex ADF page will basically be nested panelStretchLayouts and panelGroupLayouts, sometimes many, many levels deep. So this is a problem, we've known this for some time and now we have a good solution. (I should point out that the oft-used Trinidad trh tags are not a particularly good solution as you're tie-ing yourself to an HTML table based layout in that case with a host of attendent issues in resize and bi-di behavior, but I digress.) So, tadaaa, I give to you panelGridLayout. PanelGrid, as the name suggests takes a grid like (dare I say slightly gridbag-like) approach to layout, dividing your layout into rows and colums with margins, sizing, stretch behaviour, colspans and rowspans all rolled in, all without the use of inlineStyle. As such, it provides for a much more powerful and consise way of defining a layout such as the one above that is actually simpler and much more logical to design. The basic building blocks are the panelGridLayout itself, gridRow and gridCell. Your content sits inside the cells inside the rows, all helpfully allowing both streching, valign and halign definitions without the need to nest further panelGroupLayouts. So much simpler!  If I break down the homework example above my nested comglomorate of 12 containers and spacers can be condensed down into a single panelGrid with 3 rows and 5 cell definitions (39 lines of source reduced to 24 in the case of the sample). What's more, the actual runtime representation in the browser DOM is much, much simpler, and clean, with basically one DIV per cell (Note that just because the panelGridLayout semantics looks like an HTML table does not mean that it's rendered that way!) . Another hidden benefit is the runtime cost. Because we can use a single layout to achieve much more complex geometries the client side layout code inside the browser is having to work a lot less. This will be a real benefit if your application needs to run on lower powered clients such as netbooks or tablets. So, it's time, if you're on 11.1.2.2 or above, to smile warmly at your panelStretchLayouts, wrap the blanket around it's knees and wheel it off to the Sunset Retirement Home for a well deserved rest. There's a new kid on the block and it wants to be your friend. 

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• Adaptive Layout for ADF Faces on Tablets

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  In the 11.1.16 version of Oracle ADF we started adding specific features to the ADF Faces components so they'll work better on iPad tablets. In this entry I'm going to highlight some new capabilities that we have added to the 11.1.2.3 release. (note if you are still on the 11.1.1.* branch - you'll need to wait for 11.1.1.7 to get the features discussed here). The two key additions in the 11.1.2.3 version compared to the 11.1.1.6 features for iPad support include: pagination for tables and adaptive flow layout. The pagination for table is self explanatory, basically since iPad don't support scroll bars, we automatically switch the table component to render with a pagination toolbar that allow you to scroll set of records or directly jump to a specific set. See the image below. The adaptive flow layout takes a bit more explanation. On regular desktops the UI that you usually build for ADF Faces screens is going to use stretch layout - meaning that it stretches to fill the whole area of the browser window. If you resize the browser windoe, the ADF Faces page resizes with it. If your browser window is too small, scroll bars will appear to allow you to scroll to areas that are "hidden". However on an iPad, this is probably not the type of layout you want - you would rather have a flow layout that eliminates scroll bars and instead allows you to scroll down the page. Basically your want the page to be sized based on its content, rather then based on the browser window size. In ADF Faces terminology this can be done with the dimensionsFrom property set to "children". And here comes the tricky part, since in the past(and also today) when you create an ADF Faces page and add a stretchable component to it, the dimensionsFrom property is set to parent by default. This will be true to other layout components you'll add as well. At this point you might be wondering "Does this mean I'll need to go to each of the layout components in my page and modify the dimensionsFrom property value to be children?" ADF Faces to the rescue... To eliminate the need to do this tedious manual changes, we introduced a new web.xml parameter "oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS" You'll basically add the following to your web.xml <context-param>    <description>      This parameter controls the default value for component geometry on the page.      Supported values are:        legacy - component attributes use the default values as specified for the attributes                 in the tag documentation (default value)        auto   - component attributes use the correct default value given the value of their                 parent component. For example, with this setting, the panelStretchLayout                 will use "auto" as the default value for its "dimensionsFrom" attribute                 instead of "parent".    </description>    <param-name>oracle.adf.view.rich.geometry.DEFAULT_DIMENSIONS</param-name>    <param-value>auto</param-value>  </context-param> Once you set this parameter, you only need to set the dimensionsFrom attribute for the top level layout component on your page, and the rest of the components will adjust accordingly. One trick that you can use, and that is used in the demo below, is to have the dimensionsFrom property depend on the type of client that access your application. This way you can switch between stretch or flow layout based on the device accessing your application. For example I use the following in my page: <af:panelStretchLayout topHeight="70px" startWidth="0px" endWidth="0px"                                       dimensionsFrom="#{adfFacesContext.agent.capabilities['touchScreen'] eq 'none'  ? 'parent' : 'children' }"> Which results in a flow layout for iPads and a stretch layout for regular browsers. Check out the result in the below demo: &amp;lt;span id=&amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;

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• SQLIO Writes

  - by Grant Fritchey

  SQLIO is a fantastic utility for testing the abilities of the disks in your system. It has a very unfortunate name though, since it's not really a SQL Server testing utility at all. It really is a disk utility. They ought to call it DiskIO because they'd get more people using I think. Anyway, branding is not the point of this blog post. Writes are the point of this blog post. SQLIO works by slamming your disk. It performs as mean reads as it can or it performs as many writes as it can depending on how you've configured your tests. There are much smarter people than me who will get into all the various types of tests you should run. I'd suggest reading a bit of what Jonathan Kehayias (blog|twitter) has to say or wade into Denny Cherry's (blog|twitter) work. They're going to do a better job than I can describing all the benefits and mechanisms around using this excellent piece of software. My concerns are very focused. I needed to set up a series of tests to see how well our product SQL Storage Compress worked. I wanted to know the effects it would have on a system, the disk for sure, but also memory and CPU. How to stress the system? SQLIO of course. But when I set it up and ran it, following the documentation that comes with it, I was seeing better than 99% compression on the files. Don't get me wrong. Our product is magnificent, wonderful, all things great and beautiful, gets you coffee in the morning and is made mostly from bacon. But 99% compression. No, it's not that good. So what's up? Well, it's the configuration. The default mechanism is to load up a file, something large that will overwhelm your disk cache. You're instructed to load the file with a character 0x0. I never got a computer science degree. I went to film school. Because of this, I didn't memorize ASCII tables so when I saw this, I thought it was zero's or something. Nope. It's NULL. That's right, you're making a very large file, but you're filling it with NULL values. That's actually ok when all you're testing is the disk sub-system. But, when you want to test a compression and decompression, that can be an issue. I got around this fairly quickly. Instead of generating a file filled with NULL values, I just copied a database file for my tests. And to test it with SQL Storage Compress, I used a database file that had already been run through compression (about 40% compression on that file if you're interested). Now the reads were taken care of. I am seeing very realistic performance from decompressing the information for reads through SQLIO. But what about writes? Well, the issue is, what does SQLIO write? I don't have access to the code. But I do have access to the results. I did two different tests, just to be sure of what I was seeing. First test, use the .DAT file as described in the documentation. I opened the .DAT file after I was done with SQLIO, using WordPad. Guess what? It's a giant file full of air. SQLIO writes NULL values. What does that do to compression? I did the test again on a copy of an uncompressed database file. Then I ran the original and the SQLIO modified copy through ZIP to see what happened. I got better than 99% compression out of the SQLIO modified file (original file of 624,896kb went to 275,871kb compressed, after SQLIO it went to 608kb compressed). So, what does SQLIO write? It writes air. If you're trying to test it with compression or maybe some other type of file storage mechanism like dedupe, you need to know this because your tests really won't be valid. Should I find some other mechanism for testing? Yeah, if all I'm interested in is establishing performance to my own satisfaction, yes. But, I want to be able to compare my results with other people's results and we all need to be using the same tool in order for that to happen. SQLIO is the common mechanism that most people I know use to establish disk performance behavior. It'd be better if we could get SQLIO to do writes in some other fashion. Oh, and before I go, I get to brag a bit. Measuring IOPS, SQL Storage Compress outperforms my disk alone by about 30%.

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• Webcor Builders Coordinates Construction Schedules and Mitigates Potential Delays More Efficiently with Integrated Project Management

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} With more than 40 years of commercial construction experience, Webcor Builders is a leading builder of distinguished, high-profile projects, including high-rise condominiums and hotels, laboratories, healthcare centers, and public works projects. Webcor is also known for its award-winning concrete, interior construction, historic restoration, and seismic renovation work. The company has completed more than 50 million square feet of projects to date. Considering the variety and complexity of the construction projects Webcor undertakes, an integrated project management solution is critical to ensuring optimal efficiency and completing client projects on time and on budget. The company previously used a number of scheduling systems for its various building projects. These packages provided different levels of schedule detail and required schedulers, engineers, and other employees to learn multiple systems. From an IT cost and complexity perspective, the company had to manage multiple scheduling systems and pay for multiple sets of licenses. The company looked to standardize on an enterprise project management system, and selected Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management. Webcor uses the solution’s advanced capabilities to schedule complex projects, analyze delays, model and propose multiple scenarios to demonstrate and mitigate delays and cost overruns, and process that information efficiently to deliver the scheduling precision that public and private projects require. In fact, the solution was instrumental in helping the company’s expansion into public sector projects during the recent economic downturn, and with Primavera P6 in place, it can deliver the precise schedule reporting required for large public projects. With Primavera P6 in place, the company could deliver the precise scheduling and milestone reporting capabilities required for large public projects. The solution is in managing the high-profile University of California – Berkeley Memorial Stadium project. Webcor was hired as construction manager and general contractor for the stadium renovation project, which is a fast-paced project located near the seismically active Hayward Fault Zone. Due to the University of California’s football schedule, meeting the Universities deadline for the coming season placed Webcor in a situation where risk awareness and early warnings of issues would be paramount. Webcor and the extended project team needed a solution that could instantly analyze alternate scenarios to mitigate potential delays; Primavera would deliver those answers.The team would also need to enable multiple stakeholders to use an internet-based platform to access the schedule from various locations, and model complicated sequencing requirements where swift decisions would be made to keep the project on track. The schedule is an integral part of Webcor’s construction management process for the stadium project. Rather than providing the client with the industry-standard monthly update, Webcor updates the critical path method (CPM) schedule on a weekly basis. The project team also reviews the schedule and updates weekly to confirm that progress and forecasted performance are accurate. Hired by the University for their ability to deliver in high risk environments The Webcor team was hit recently with a design supplement that could have added up to 70 days to the project. Using Oracle Primavera P6 the team sprung into action analyzing multiple “what if” scenarios to review mitigation means and methods.  Determined to make sure the Bears could take the field in the coming season the project team nearly eliminated the impact with their creative analysis in working the schedule. The total time from the issuance of the final design supplement to an agreed mitigation response was less than one week; leveraging the Oracle Primavera solution Webcor was able to deliver superior customer value With the ability to efficiently manage projects and schedules, Webcor can ensure it completes its projects on time and on budget, as well as inform clients about what changes to plans will mean in terms of delays and additional costs. Read the complete customer case study at :  http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/customers/customersearch/webcor-builders-1-primavera-ss-1639886.html

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• (Unity)Getting a mirrored mesh from my data structure

  - by Steve

  Here's the background: I'm in the beginning stages of an RTS game in Unity. I have a procedurally generated terrain with a perlin-noise height map, as well as a function to generate a river. The problem is that the graphical creation of the map is taking the data structure of the map and rotating it by 180 degrees. I noticed this problem when i was creating my rivers. I would set the River's height to flat, and noticed that the actual tiles that were flat in the graphical representation were flipped and mirrored. Here's 3 screenshots of the map from different angles: http://imgur.com/a/VLHHq As you can see, if you flipped (graphically) the river by 180 degrees on the z axis, it would fit where the terrain is flattened. I have a suspicion it is being caused by a misunderstanding on my part of how vertices work. Alas, here is a snippet of the code that is used: This code here creates a new array of Tile objects, which hold the information for each tile, including its type, coordinate, height, and it's 4 vertices public DTileMap (int size_x, int size_y) { this.size_x = size_x; this.size_y = size_y; //Initialize Map_Data Array of Tile Objects map_data = new Tile[size_x, size_y]; for (int j = 0; j < size_y; j++) { for (int i = 0; i < size_x; i++) { map_data [i, j] = new Tile (); map_data[i,j].coordinate.x = (int)i; map_data[i,j].coordinate.y = (int)j; map_data[i,j].vertices[0] = new Vector3 (i * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize, map_data[i,j].Height, -j * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize); map_data[i,j].vertices[1] = new Vector3 ((i+1) * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize, map_data[i,j].Height, -(j) * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize); map_data[i,j].vertices[2] = new Vector3 (i * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize, map_data[i,j].Height, -(j-1) * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize); map_data[i,j].vertices[3] = new Vector3 ((i+1) * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize, map_data[i,j].Height, -(j-1) * GTileMap.TileMap.tileSize); } } This code sets the river tiles to height 0 foreach (Tile t in map_data) { if (t.realType == "Water") { t.vertices[0].y = 0f; t.vertices[1].y = 0f; t.vertices[2].y = 0f; t.vertices[3].y = 0f; } } And below is the code to generate the actual graphics from the data: public void BuildMesh () { DTileMap.DTileMap map = new DTileMap.DTileMap (size_x, size_z); int numTiles = size_x * size_z; int numTris = numTiles * 2; int vsize_x = size_x + 1; int vsize_z = size_z + 1; int numVerts = vsize_x * vsize_z; // Generate the mesh data Vector3[] vertices = new Vector3[ numVerts ]; Vector3[] normals = new Vector3[numVerts]; Vector2[] uv = new Vector2[numVerts]; int[] triangles = new int[ numTris * 3 ]; int x, z; for (z=0; z < vsize_z; z++) { for (x=0; x < vsize_x; x++) { normals [z * vsize_x + x] = Vector3.up; uv [z * vsize_x + x] = new Vector2 ((float)x / size_x, 1f - (float)z / size_z); } } for (z=0; z < vsize_z; z+=1) { for (x=0; x < vsize_x; x+=1) { if (x == vsize_x - 1 && z == vsize_z - 1) { vertices [z * vsize_x + x] = DTileMap.DTileMap.map_data [x - 1, z - 1].vertices [3]; } else if (z == vsize_z - 1) { vertices [z * vsize_x + x] = DTileMap.DTileMap.map_data [x, z - 1].vertices [2]; } else if (x == vsize_x - 1) { vertices [z * vsize_x + x] = DTileMap.DTileMap.map_data [x - 1, z].vertices [1]; } else { vertices [z * vsize_x + x] = DTileMap.DTileMap.map_data [x, z].vertices [0]; vertices [z * vsize_x + x+1] = DTileMap.DTileMap.map_data [x, z].vertices [1]; vertices [(z+1) * vsize_x + x] = DTileMap.DTileMap.map_data [x, z].vertices [2]; vertices [(z+1) * vsize_x + x+1] = DTileMap.DTileMap.map_data [x, z].vertices [3]; } } } } for (z=0; z < size_z; z++) { for (x=0; x < size_x; x++) { int squareIndex = z * size_x + x; int triOffset = squareIndex * 6; triangles [triOffset + 0] = z * vsize_x + x + 0; triangles [triOffset + 2] = z * vsize_x + x + vsize_x + 0; triangles [triOffset + 1] = z * vsize_x + x + vsize_x + 1; triangles [triOffset + 3] = z * vsize_x + x + 0; triangles [triOffset + 5] = z * vsize_x + x + vsize_x + 1; triangles [triOffset + 4] = z * vsize_x + x + 1; } } // Create a new Mesh and populate with the data Mesh mesh = new Mesh (); mesh.vertices = vertices; mesh.triangles = triangles; mesh.normals = normals; mesh.uv = uv; // Assign our mesh to our filter/renderer/collider MeshFilter mesh_filter = GetComponent<MeshFilter> (); MeshCollider mesh_collider = GetComponent<MeshCollider> (); mesh_filter.mesh = mesh; mesh_collider.sharedMesh = mesh; calculateMeshTangents (mesh); BuildTexture (map); } If this looks familiar to you, its because i got most of it from Quill18. I've been slowly adapting it for my uses. And please include any suggestions you have for my code. I'm still in the very early prototyping stage.

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• Problem with deleting table rows using ctrl+a for row selection

  - by Frank Nimphius

  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: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;} The following code is commonly shown and documented for how to access the row key of selected table rows in an ADF Faces table configured for multi row selection. public void onRemoveSelectedTableRows(ActionEvent actionEvent) {    RichTable richTable = … get access to your table instance …    CollectionModel cm =(CollectionModel)richTable.getValue();    RowKeySet rowKeySet = (RowKeySet)richTable.getSelectedRowKeys();             for (Object key : rowKeySet) {       richTable.setRowKey(key);       JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rowData = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)cm.getRowData();       // do something with rowData e.g.update, print, copy   }    //optional, if you changed data, refresh the table         AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext = AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); adfFacesContext.addPartialTarget(richTable);   return null; } The code shown above works for 99.5 % of all use cases that deal with multi row selection enabled ADF Faces tables, except for when users use the ctrl+a key to mark all rows for delete. Just to make sure I am clear: if you use ctrl+a to mark rows to perform any other operation on them – like bulk updating all rows for a specific attribute – then this works with the code shown above. Even for bulk row delete, any other mean of row selection (shift+click and multiple ctrl+click) works like a charm and the rows are deleted. So apparently it is the use of ctrl+a that causes the problem when deleting multiple rows of an ADF Faces table. To implement code that works for all table selection use cases, including the one to delete all table rows in one go, you use the code shown below. public void onRemoveSelectedTableRows(ActionEvent actionEvent) {   RichTable richTable = … get access to your table instance …   CollectionModel cm = (CollectionModel)richTable.getValue();   RowKeySet rowKeySet = (RowKeySet)richTable.getSelectedRowKeys();   Object[] rowKeySetArray = rowKeySet.toArray();      for (Object key : rowKeySetArray){               richTable.setRowKey(key);     JUCtrlHierNodeBinding rowData = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)cm.getRowData();                              rowData.getRow().remove();   }   AdfFacesContext adfFacesContext = AdfFacesContext.getCurrentInstance();          adfFacesContext.addPartialTarget(richTable); }

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• ANTS CLR and Memory Profiler In Depth Review (Part 2 of 2 &ndash; Memory Profiler)

  - by ToStringTheory

  One of the things that people might not know about me, is my obsession to make my code as efficient as possible. Many people might not realize how much of a task or undertaking that this might be, but it is surely a task as monumental as climbing Mount Everest, except this time it is a challenge for the mind… In trying to make code efficient, there are many different factors that play a part – size of project or solution, tiers, language used, experience and training of the programmer, technologies used, maintainability of the code – the list can go on for quite some time. I spend quite a bit of time when developing trying to determine what is the best way to implement a feature to accomplish the efficiency that I look to achieve. One program that I have recently come to learn about – Red Gate ANTS Performance (CLR) and Memory profiler gives me tools to accomplish that job more efficiently as well. In this review, I am going to cover some of the features of the ANTS memory profiler set by compiling some hideous example code to test against. Notice As a member of the Geeks With Blogs Influencers program, one of the perks is the ability to review products, in exchange for a free license to the program. I have not let this affect my opinions of the product in any way, and Red Gate nor Geeks With Blogs has tried to influence my opinion regarding this product in any way. Introduction – Part 2 In my last post, I reviewed the feature packed Red Gate ANTS Performance Profiler.  Separate from the Red Gate Performance Profiler is the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler – a simple, easy to use utility for checking how your application is handling memory management…  A tool that I wish I had had many times in the past.  This post will be focusing on the ANTS Memory Profiler and its tool set. The memory profiler has a large assortment of features just like the Performance Profiler, with the new session looking nearly exactly alike: ANTS Memory Profiler Memory profiling is not something that I have to do very often…  In the past, the few cases I’ve had to find a memory leak in an application I have usually just had to trace the code of the operations being performed to look for oddities…  Sadly, I have come across more undisposed/non-using’ed IDisposable objects, usually from ADO.Net than I would like to ever see.  Support is not fun, however using ANTS Memory Profiler makes this task easier.  For this round of testing, I am going to use the same code from my previous example, using the WPF application. This time, I will choose the ‘Profile Memory’ option from the ANTS menu in Visual Studio, which launches the solution in its currently configured state/start-up project, and then launches the ANTS Memory Profiler to help.  It prepopulates all of the fields with the current project information, and all I have to do is select the ‘Start Profiling’ option. When the window comes up, it is actually quite barren, just giving ideas on how to work the profiler.  You start by getting to the point in your application that you want to profile, and then taking a ‘Memory Snapshot’.  This performs a full garbage collection, and snapshots the managed heap.  Using the same WPF app as before, I will go ahead and take a snapshot now. As you can see, ANTS is already giving me lots of information regarding the snapshot, however this is just a snapshot.  The whole point of the profiler is to perform an action, usually one where a memory problem is being noticed, and then take another snapshot and perform a diff between them to see what has changed.  I am going to go ahead and generate 5000 primes, and then take another snapshot: As you can see, ANTS is already giving me a lot of new information about this snapshot compared to the last.  Information such as difference in memory usage, fragmentation, class usage, etc…  If you take more snapshots, you can use the dropdown at the top to set your actual comparison snapshots. If you beneath the timeline, you will see a breadcrumb trail showing how best to approach profiling memory using ANTS.  When you first do the comparison, you start on the Summary screen.  You can either use the charts at the bottom, or switch to the class list screen to get to the next step.  Here is the class list screen: As you can see, it lists information about all of the instances between the snapshots, as well as at the bottom giving you a way to filter by telling ANTS what your problem is.  I am going to go ahead and select the Int16[] to look at the Instance Categorizer Using the instance categorizer, you can travel backwards to see where all of the instances are coming from.  It may be hard to see in this image, but hopefully the lightbox (click on it) will help: I can see that all of these instances are rooted to the application through the UI TextBlock control.  This image will probably be even harder to see, however using the ‘Instance Retention Graph’, you can trace an objects memory inheritance up the chain to see its roots as well.  This is a simple example, as this is simply a known element.  Usually you would be profiling an actual problem, and comparing those differences.  I know in the past, I have spotted a problem where a new context was created per page load, and it was rooted into the application through an event.  As the application began to grow, performance and reliability problems started to emerge.  A tool like this would have been a great way to identify the problem quickly. Overview Overall, I think that the Red Gate ANTS Memory Profiler is a great utility for debugging those pesky leaks.  3 Biggest Pros: Easy to use interface with lots of options for configuring profiling session Intuitive and helpful interface for drilling down from summary, to instance, to root graphs ANTS provides an API for controlling the profiler. Not many options, but still helpful. 2 Biggest Cons: Inability to automatically snapshot the memory by interval Lack of complete integration with Visual Studio via an extension panel Ratings Ease of Use (9/10) – I really do believe that they have brought simplicity to the once difficult task of memory profiling.  I especially liked how it stepped you further into the drilldown by directing you towards the best options. Effectiveness (10/10) – I believe that the profiler does EXACTLY what it purports to do.  Features (7/10) – A really great set of features all around in the application, however, I would like to see some ability for automatically triggering snapshots based on intervals or framework level items such as events. Customer Service (10/10) – My entire experience with Red Gate personnel has been nothing but good.  their people are friendly, helpful, and happy! UI / UX (9/10) – The interface is very easy to get around, and all of the options are easy to find.  With a little bit of poking around, you’ll be optimizing Hello World in no time flat! Overall (9/10) – Overall, I am happy with the Memory Profiler and its features, as well as with the service I received when working with the Red Gate personnel.  Thank you for reading up to here, or skipping ahead – I told you it would be shorter!  Please, if you do try the product, drop me a message and let me know what you think!  I would love to hear any opinions you may have on the product. Code Feel free to download the code I used above – download via DropBox

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• Introduction to Human Workflow 11g

  - by agiovannetti

  Human Workflow is a component of SOA Suite just like BPEL, Mediator, Business Rules, etc. The Human Workflow component allows you to incorporate human intervention in a business process. You can use Human Workflow to create a business process that requires a manager to approve purchase orders greater than $10,000; or a business process that handles article reviews in which a group of reviewers need to vote/approve an article before it gets published. Human Workflow can handle the task assignment and routing as well as the generation of notifications to the participants. There are three common patterns or usages of Human Workflow: 1) Approval Scenarios: manage documents and other transactional data through approval chains . For example: approve expense report, vacation approval, hiring approval, etc. 2) Reviews by multiple users or groups: group collaboration and review of documents or proposals. For example, processing a sales quote which is subject to review by multiple people. 3) Case Management: workflows around work management or case management. For example, processing a service request. This could be routed to various people who all need to modify the task. It may also incorporate ad hoc routing which is unknown at design time. SOA 11g Human Workflow includes the following features: Assignment and routing of tasks to the correct users or groups. Deadlines, escalations, notifications, and other features required for ensuring the timely performance of a task. Presentation of tasks to end users through a variety of mechanisms, including a Worklist application. Organization, filtering, prioritization and other features required for end users to productively perform their tasks. Reports, reassignments, load balancing and other features required by supervisors and business owners to manage the performance of tasks. Human Workflow Architecture The Human Workflow component is divided into 3 modules: the service interface, the task definition and the client interface module. The Service Interface handles the interaction with BPEL and other components. The Client Interface handles the presentation of task data through clients like the Worklist application, portals and notification channels. The task definition module is in charge of managing the lifecycle of a task. Who should get the task assigned? What should happen next with the task? When must the task be completed? Should the task be escalated?, etc Stages and Participants When you create a Human Task you need to specify how the task is assigned and routed. The first step is to define the stages and participants. A stage is just a logical group. A participant can be a user, a group of users or an application role. The participants indicate the type of assignment and routing that will be performed. Stages can be sequential or in parallel. You can combine them to create any usage you require. See diagram below: Assignment and Routing There are different ways a task can be assigned and routed: Single Approver: task is assigned to a single user, group or role. For example, a vacation request is assigned to a manager. If the manager approves or rejects the request, the employee is notified with the decision. If the task is assigned to a group then once one of managers acts on it, the task is completed. Parallel : task is assigned to a set of people that must work in parallel. This is commonly used for voting. For example, a task gets approved once 50% of the participants approve it. You can also set it up to be a unanimous vote. Serial : participants must work in sequence. The most common scenario for this is management chain escalation. FYI (For Your Information) : task is assigned to participants who can view it, add comments and attachments, but can not modify or complete the task. Task Actions The following is the list of actions that can be performed on a task: Claim : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, then the task must be claimed first to be able to act on it. Escalate : if the participant is not able to complete a task, he/she can escalate it. The task is reassigned to his/her manager (up one level in a hierarchy). Pushback : the task is sent back to the previous assignee. Reassign :if the participant is a manager, he/she can delegate a task to his/her reports. Release : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, it can be released if the user who claimed the task cannot complete the task. Any of the other assignees can claim and complete the task. Request Information and Submit Information : use when the participant needs to supply more information or to request more information from the task creator or any of the previous assignees. Suspend and Resume :if a task is not relevant, it can be suspended. A suspension is indefinite. It does not expire until Resume is used to resume working on the task. Withdraw : if the creator of a task does not want to continue with it, for example, he wants to cancel a vacation request, he can withdraw the task. The business process determines what happens next. Renew : if a task is about to expire, the participant can renew it. The task expiration date is extended one week. Notifications Human Workflow provides a mechanism for sending notifications to participants to alert them of changes on a task. Notifications can be sent via email, telephone voice message, instant messaging (IM) or short message service (SMS). Notifications can be sent when the task status changes to any of the following: Assigned/renewed/delegated/reassigned/escalated Completed Error Expired Request Info Resume Suspended Added/Updated comments and/or attachments Updated Outcome Withdraw Other Actions (e.g. acquiring a task) Here is an example of an email notification: Worklist Application Oracle BPM Worklist application is the default user interface included in SOA Suite. It allows users to access and act on tasks that have been assigned to them. For example, from the Worklist application, a loan agent can review loan applications or a manager can approve employee vacation requests. Through the Worklist Application users can: Perform authorized actions on tasks, acquire and check out shared tasks, define personal to-do tasks and define subtasks. Filter tasks view based on various criteria. Work with standard work queues, such as high priority tasks, tasks due soon and so on. Work queues allow users to create a custom view to group a subset of tasks in the worklist, for example, high priority tasks, tasks due in 24 hours, expense approval tasks and more. Define custom work queues. Gain proxy access to part of another user's tasks. Define custom vacation rules and delegation rules. Enable group owners to define task dispatching rules for shared tasks. Collect a complete workflow history and audit trail. Use digital signatures for tasks. Run reports like Unattended tasks, Tasks productivity, etc. Here is a screenshoot of what the Worklist Application looks like. On the right hand side you can see the tasks that have been assigned to the user and the task's detail. References Introduction to SOA Suite 11g Human Workflow Webcast Note 1452937.2 Human Workflow Information Center Using the Human Workflow Service Component 11.1.1.6 Human Workflow Samples Human Workflow APIs Java Docs

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• Data Source Security Part 5

  - by Steve Felts

  If you read through the first four parts of this series on data source security, you should be an expert on this focus area.  There is one more small topic to cover related to WebLogic Resource permissions.  After that comes the test, I mean example, to see with a real set of configuration parameters what the results are with some concrete values. WebLogic Resource Permissions All of the discussion so far has been about database credentials that are (eventually) used on the database side.  WLS has resource credentials to control what WLS users are allowed to access JDBC resources.  These can be defined on the Policies tab on the Security tab associated with the data source.  There are four permissions: “reserve” (get a new connection), “admin”, “shrink”, and reset (plus the all-inclusive “ALL”); we will focus on “reserve” here because we are talking about getting connections.  By default, JDBC resource permissions are completely open – anyone can do anything.  As soon as you add one policy for a permission, then all other users are restricted.  For example, if I add a policy so that “weblogic” can reserve a connection, then all other users will fail to reserve connections unless they are also explicitly added.  The validation is done for WLS user credentials only, not database user credentials.  Configuration of resources in general is described at “Create policies for resource instances” http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E24329_01/apirefs.1211/e24401/taskhelp/security/CreatePoliciesForResourceInstances.html.  This feature can be very useful to restrict what code and users can get to your database. There are the three use cases: API Use database credentials User for permission checking getConnection() True or false Current WLS user getConnection(user,password) False User/password from API getConnection(user,password) True Current WLS user If a simple getConnection() is used or database credentials are enabled, the current user that is authenticated to the WLS system is checked. If database credentials are not enabled, then the user and password on the API are used. Example The following is an actual example of the interactions between identity-based-connection-pooling-enabled, oracle-proxy-session, and use-database-credentials. On the database side, the following objects are configured.- Database users scott; jdbcqa; jdbcqa3- Permission for proxy: alter user jdbcqa3 grant connect through jdbcqa;- Permission for proxy: alter user jdbcqa grant connect through jdbcqa; The following WebLogic Data Source objects are configured.- Users weblogic, wluser- Credential mapping “weblogic” to “scott”- Credential mapping "wluser" to "jdbcqa3"- Data source descriptor configured with user “jdbcqa”- All tests are run with Set Client ID set to true (more about that below).- All tests are run with oracle-proxy-session set to false (more about that below). The test program:- Runs in servlet- Authenticates to WLS as user “weblogic” Use DB Credentials Identity based getConnection(scott,***) getConnection(weblogic,***) getConnection(jdbcqa3,***) getConnection()  true  true Identity scottClient weblogicProxy null weblogic fails - not a db user User jdbcqa3Client weblogicProxy null Default user jdbcqaClient weblogicProxy null  false  true scott fails - not a WLS user User scottClient scottProxy null jdbcqa3 fails - not a WLS user User scottClient scottProxy null  true  false Proxy for scott fails weblogic fails - not a db user User jdbcqa3Client weblogicProxy jdbcqa Default user jdbcqaClient weblogicProxy null  false  false scott fails - not a WLS user Default user jdbcqaClient scottProxy null jdbcqa3 fails - not a WLS user Default user jdbcqaClient scottProxy null If Set Client ID is set to false, all cases would have Client set to null. If this was not an Oracle thin driver, the one case with the non-null Proxy in the above table would throw an exception because proxy session is only supported, implicitly or explicitly, with the Oracle thin driver. When oracle-proxy-session is set to true, the only cases that will pass (with a proxy of "jdbcqa") are the following.1. Setting use-database-credentials to true and doing getConnection(jdbcqa3,…) or getConnection().2. Setting use-database-credentials to false and doing getConnection(wluser, …) or getConnection(). Summary There are many options to choose from for data source security.  Considerations include the number and volatility of WLS and Database users, the granularity of data access, the depth of the security identity (property on the connection or a real user), performance, coordination of various components in the software stack, and driver capabilities.  Now that you have the big picture (remember that table in part 1), you can make a more informed choice.

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• Social Engagement: One Size Doesn't Fit Anyone

  - by Mike Stiles

  The key to achieving meaningful social engagement is to know who you’re talking to, know what they like, and consistently deliver that kind of material to them. Every magazine for women knows this. When you read the article titles promoted on their covers, there’s no mistaking for whom that magazine is intended. And yet, confusion still reigns at many brands as to exactly whom they want to talk to, what those people want to hear, and what kind of content they should be creating for them. In most instances, the root problem is brands want to be all things to all people. Their target audience…the world! Good luck with that. It’s 2012, the age of aggregation and custom content delivery. To cope with the modern day barrage of information, people have constructed technological filters so that content they regard as being “for them” is mostly what gets through. Even if your brand is for men and women, young and old, you may want to consider social properties that divide men from women, and young from old. Yes, a man might find something in a women’s magazine that interests him. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to subscribe to it, or buy even one issue. In fact he’ll probably never see the article he’d otherwise be interested in, because in his mind, “This isn’t for me.” It wasn’t packaged for him. News Flash: men and women are different. So it’s a tall order to craft your Facebook Page or Twitter handle to simultaneously exude the motivators for both. The Harris Interactive study “2012 Connecting and Communicating Online: State of Social Media” sheds light on the differing social behaviors and drivers. -65% of women (vs. 59% of men) stay glued to social because they don’t want to miss anything. -25% of women check social when they wake up, before they check email. Only 18% of men check social before e-mail. -95% of women surveyed belong to Facebook vs. 86% of men. -67% of women log in to Facebook once a day or more vs. 54% of men. -Conventional wisdom is Pinterest is mostly a woman-thing, right? That may be true for viewing, but not true for sharing. Men are actually more likely to share on Pinterest than women, 23% to 10%. -The sharing divide extends to YouTube. 68% of women use it mainly for consumption, as opposed to 52% of men. -Women are as likely to have a Twitter account as men, but they’re much less likely to check it often. 54% of women check it once a week compared to 2/3 of men. Obviously, there are some takeaways from this depending on your target. Women don’t want to miss out on anything, so serialized content might be a good idea, right? Promotional posts that lead to a big payoff could keep them hooked. Posts for women might be better served first thing in the morning. If sharing is your goal, maybe male-targeted content is more likely to get those desired shares. And maybe Twitter is a better place to aim your male-targeted content than Facebook. Some grocery stores started experimenting with male-only aisles. The results have been impressive. Why? Because while it’s true men were finding those same items in the store just fine before, now something has been created just for them. They have a place in the store where they belong. Each brand’s strategy and targets are going to differ. The point is…know who you’re talking to, know how they behave, know what they like, and deliver content using any number of social relationship management targeting tools that meets their expectations. If, however, you’re committed to a one-size-fits-all, “our content is for everybody” strategy (or even worse, a “this is what we want to put out and we expect everybody to love it” strategy), your content will miss the mark for more often than it hits. @mikestilesPhoto via stock.schng

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• JPRT: A Build & Test System

  - by kto

  DRAFT A while back I did a little blogging on a system called JPRT, the hardware used and a summary on my java.net weblog. This is an update on the JPRT system. JPRT ("JDK Putback Reliablity Testing", but ignore what the letters stand for, I change what they mean every day, just to annoy people :\^) is a build and test system for the JDK, or any source base that has been configured for JPRT. As I mentioned in the above blog, JPRT is a major modification to a system called PRT that the HotSpot VM development team has been using for many years, very successfully I might add. Keeping the source base always buildable and reliable is the first step in the 12 steps of dealing with your product quality... or was the 12 steps from Alcoholics Anonymous... oh well, anyway, it's the first of many steps. ;\^) Internally when we make changes to any part of the JDK, there are certain procedures we are required to perform prior to any putback or commit of the changes. The procedures often vary from team to team, depending on many factors, such as whether native code is changed, or if the change could impact other areas of the JDK. But a common requirement is a verification that the source base with the changes (and merged with the very latest source base) will build on many of not all 8 platforms, and a full 'from scratch' build, not an incremental build, which can hide full build problems. The testing needed varies, depending on what has been changed. Anyone that was worked on a project where multiple engineers or groups are submitting changes to a shared source base knows how disruptive a 'bad commit' can be on everyone. How many times have you heard: "So And So made a bunch of changes and now I can't build!". But multiply the number of platforms by 8, and make all the platforms old and antiquated OS versions with bizarre system setup requirements and you have a pretty complicated situation (see http://download.java.net/jdk6/docs/build/README-builds.html). We don't tolerate bad commits, but our enforcement is somewhat lacking, usually it's an 'after the fact' correction. Luckily the Source Code Management system we use (another antique called TeamWare) allows for a tree of repositories and 'bad commits' are usually isolated to a small team. Punishment to date has been pretty drastic, the Queen of Hearts in 'Alice in Wonderland' said 'Off With Their Heads', well trust me, you don't want to be the engineer doing a 'bad commit' to the JDK. With JPRT, hopefully this will become a thing of the past, not that we have had many 'bad commits' to the master source base, in general the teams doing the integrations know how important their jobs are and they rarely make 'bad commits'. So for these JDK integrators, maybe what JPRT does is keep them from chewing their finger nails at night. ;\^) Over the years each of the teams have accumulated sets of machines they use for building, or they use some of the shared machines available to all of us. But the hunt for build machines is just part of the job, or has been. And although the issues with consistency of the build machines hasn't been a horrible problem, often you never know if the Solaris build machine you are using has all the right patches, or if the Linux machine has the right service pack, or if the Windows machine has it's latest updates. Hopefully the JPRT system can solve this problem. When we ship the binary JDK bits, it is SO very important that the build machines are correct, and we know how difficult it is to get them setup. Sure, if you need to debug a JDK problem that only shows up on Windows XP or Solaris 9, you'll still need to hunt down a machine, but not as a regular everyday occurance. I'm a big fan of a regular nightly build and test system, constantly verifying that a source base builds and tests out. There are many examples of automated build/tests, some that trigger on any change to the source base, some that just run every night. Some provide a protection gateway to the 'golden' source base which only gets changes that the nightly process has verified are good. The JPRT (and PRT) system is meant to guard the source base before anything is sent to it, guarding all source bases from the evil developer, well maybe 'evil' isn't the right word, I haven't met many 'evil' developers, more like 'error prone' developers. ;\^) Humm, come to think about it, I may be one from time to time. :\^{ But the point is that by spreading the build up over a set of machines, and getting the turnaround down to under an hour, it becomes realistic to completely build on all platforms and test it, on every putback. We have the technology, we can build and rebuild and rebuild, and it will be better than it was before, ha ha... Anybody remember the Six Million Dollar Man? Man, I gotta get out more often.. Anyway, now the nightly build and test can become a 'fetch the latest JPRT build bits' and start extensive testing (the testing not done by JPRT, or the platforms not tested by JPRT). Is it Open Source? No, not yet. Would you like to be? Let me know. Or is it more important that you have the ability to use such a system for JDK changes? So enough blabbering on about this JPRT system, tell me what you think. And let me know if you want to hear more about it or not. Stay tuned for the next episode, same Bloody Bat time, same Bloody Bat channel. ;\^) -kto

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 6): 9i Query Performance

  - by Simon Cooper

  All throughout the EAP and beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, our main request was support for Oracle 9i. After releasing version 1.0 with support for 10g and 11g, our next step was then to get version 1.1 of SCfO out with support for 9i. However, there were some significant problems that we had to overcome first. This post will concentrate on query execution time. When we first tested SCfO on a 9i server, after accounting for various changes to the data dictionary, we found that database registration was taking a long time. And I mean a looooooong time. The same database that on 10g or 11g would take a couple of minutes to register would be taking upwards of 30 mins on 9i. Obviously, this is not ideal, so a poke around the query execution plans was required. As an example, let's take the table population query - the one that reads ALL_TABLES and joins it with a few other dictionary views to get us back our list of tables. On 10g, this query takes 5.6 seconds. On 9i, it takes 89.47 seconds. The difference in execution plan is even more dramatic - here's the (edited) execution plan on 10g: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 108K| 939 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 108K| 939 || 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 108K| 938 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 103K| 762 || 4 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 2058 | 3 ||* 20 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 73472 | 759 || 21 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 2097 | 3 ||* 34 | HASH JOIN RIGHT OUTER | | 39920 | 755 || 35 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 7 || 58 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 39104 | 748 || 59 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 6704 | 668 || 89 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2025 | 5 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 277 | 11 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And the same query on 9i: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 16P| 55G|| 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 16P| 55G|| 2 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 16P| 862M|| 3 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 5251G| 992K|| 4 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 4243M| 2578 || 5 | NESTED LOOPS OUTER | | 2669K| 1440 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 ||* 50 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | ||* 66 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| ||* 80 | VIEW PUSHED PREDICATE | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| ||* 96 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a look at the cost column. 10g's overall query cost is 939, and 9i is 55,000,000,000 (or more precisely, 55,496,472,769). It's also having to process far more data. What on earth could be causing this huge difference in query cost? After trawling through the '10g New Features' documentation, we found item 1.9.2.21. Before 10g, Oracle advised that you do not collect statistics on data dictionary objects. From 10g, it advised that you do collect statistics on the data dictionary; for our queries, Oracle therefore knows what sort of data is in the dictionary tables, and so can generate an efficient execution plan. On 9i, no statistics are present on the system tables, so Oracle has to use the Rule Based Optimizer, which turns most LEFT JOINs into nested loops. If we force 9i to use hash joins, like 10g, we get a much better plan: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------| Id | Operation | Name | Bytes | Cost |-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 7587K| 3704 || 1 | SORT ORDER BY | | 7587K| 3704 ||* 2 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 7587K| 822 ||* 3 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 5262K| 616 ||* 4 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 2980K| 465 ||* 5 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 710K| 432 ||* 6 | HASH JOIN OUTER | | 398K| 302 || 7 | VIEW | ALL_TABLES | 342K| 276 || 29 | VIEW | ALL_MVIEWS | 51 | 20 || 50 | VIEW | ALL_PART_TABLES | 852K| 104 || 78 | VIEW | ALL_TAB_COMMENTS | 2043 | 14 || 93 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_LOCATIONS | 1744K| 31 || 106 | VIEW | ALL_EXTERNAL_TABLES | 1777K| 28 |------------------------------------------------------------------------------- That's much more like it. This drops the execution time down to 24 seconds. Not as good as 10g, but still an improvement. There are still several problems with this, however. 10g introduced a new join method - a right outer hash join (used in the first execution plan). The 9i query optimizer doesn't have this option available, so forcing a hash join means it has to hash the ALL_TABLES table, and furthermore re-hash it for every hash join in the execution plan; this could be thousands and thousands of rows. And although forcing hash joins somewhat alleviates this problem on our test systems, there's no guarantee that this will improve the execution time on customers' systems; it may even increase the time it takes (say, if all their tables are partitioned, or they've got a lot of materialized views). Ideally, we would want a solution that provides a speedup whatever the input. To try and get some ideas, we asked some oracle performance specialists to see if they had any ideas or tips. Their recommendation was to add a hidden hook into the product that allowed users to specify their own query hints, or even rewrite the queries entirely. However, we would prefer not to take that approach; as well as a lot of new infrastructure & a rewrite of the population code, it would have meant that any users of 9i would have to spend some time optimizing it to get it working on their system before they could use the product. Another approach was needed. All our population queries have a very specific pattern - a base table provides most of the information we need (ALL_TABLES for tables, or ALL_TAB_COLS for columns) and we do a left join to extra subsidiary tables that fill in gaps (for instance, ALL_PART_TABLES for partition information). All the left joins use the same set of columns to join on (typically the object owner & name), so we could re-use the hash information for each join, rather than re-hashing the same columns for every join. To allow us to do this, along with various other performance improvements that could be done for the specific query pattern we were using, we read all the tables individually and do a hash join on the client. Fortunately, this 'pure' algorithmic problem is the kind that can be very well optimized for expected real-world situations; as well as storing row data we're not using in the hash key on disk, we use very specific memory-efficient data structures to store all the information we need. This allows us to achieve a database population time that is as fast as on 10g, and even (in some situations) slightly faster, and a memory overhead of roughly 150 bytes per row of data in the result set (for schemas with 10,000 tables in that means an extra 1.4MB memory being used during population). Next: fun with the 9i dictionary views.

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• Big data: An evening in the life of an actual buyer

  - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks

  Here I am, and this is an actual story of one of my evenings, trying to spend money with a company and ultimately failing. I just gave up and bought a service from another vendor, not the incumbent. Here is that story and how I think big data could actually fix this (and potentially prevent some of this from happening). In the end this story should illustrate how big data can benefit me (get me what I want without causing grief) and the company I am trying to buy something from. Note: Lots of details left out, I have no intention of being the annoyed blogger moaning about a specific company. What did I want to get? We watch TV, we have internet and we do have a land line. The land line is from a different vendor then the TV and the internet. I have decided that this makes no sense and I was going to get a bundle (no need to infer who this is, I just picked the generic bundle word as this is what I want to get) of all three services as this seems to save me money. I also want to not talk to people, I just want to click on a website when I feel like it and get it all sorted. I do think that is reality. I want to just do my shopping at 9.30pm while watching silly reruns on TV. Problem 1 - Bad links So, I'm an existing customer of the company I want to buy my bundle from. I go to the website, I click on offers. Turns out they are offers for new customers. After grumbling about how good they are, I click on offers for existing customers. Bummer, it goes to offers for new customers, so I click again on the link for offers for existing customers. No cigar... it just does not work. Big data solutions: 1) Do not show an existing customer the offers for new customers unless they are the same => This is only partially doable without login, but if a customer logs in the application should always know that this is an existing customer. But in general, imagine I do this from my home going through the internet service of this vendor to their domain... an instant filter should move me into the "existing customer route". 2) Flag dead or incorrect links => I've clicked the link for "existing customer offers" at least 3 times in under 5 seconds... Identifying patterns like this is easy in Hadoop and can very quickly make a list of potentially incorrect links. No need for realtime fixing, just the fact that this link can be pro-actively fixed across my entire web domain is a good thing. Preventative maintenance! Problem 2 - Purchase cannot be completed Apart from the fact that the browsing pattern to actually get to what I want is poorly designed, my purchase never gets past a specific point. In other words, I put something into my shopping cart and when I want to move on the application either crashes (with me going to an error page) or hangs or goes into something like chat. So I try again, and again and again. I think I tried this entire path (while being logged in!!) at least 10 times over the course of 20 minutes. I also clicked on the feedback button and, frustrated as I was, tried to explain this did not work... Big Data Solutions: 1) This web site does shopping cart analysis. I got an email next day stating I have things in my shopping cart, just click here to complete my purchase. After the above experience, this just added insult to my pain... 2) What should have happened, is a Hadoop job going over all logged in customers that are on the buy flow. It should flag anyone who is trying (multiple attempts from the same user to do the same thing), analyze the shopping card, the clicks to identify what the customers wants, his feedback provided (note: always own your own website feedback, never just farm this out!!) and in a short turn around time (30 minutes to 2 hours or so) email me with a link to complete my purchase. Not with a link to my shopping cart 12 hours later, but a link to actually achieve what I wanted... Why should this company go through the big data effort? I do believe this is relatively easy to do using our Oracle Event Processing and Big Data Appliance solutions combined. It is almost so simple (to my mind) that it makes no sense that this is not in place? But, now I am ranting... Why is this interesting? It is because of $$$$. After trying really hard, I mean I did this all in the evening, and again in the morning before going to work. I kept on failing, But I really wanted this to work... so an email that said, sorry, we noticed you tried to get a bundle (the log knows what I wanted, where I failed, so easy to generate), here is the link to click and complete your purchase. And here is 2 movies on us as an apology would have kept me as a customer, and got the additional $$$$ per month for the next couple of years. It would also lead to upsell on my phone package etc. Instead, I went to a completely different company, bought service from them. Lost money for company A, negative sentiment for company A and me telling this story at the water cooler so I'm influencing more people to think negatively about company A. All in all, a loss of easy money, a ding in sentiment and image where a relatively simple solution exists and can be in place on the software I describe routinely in this blog... For those who are coming to Openworld and maybe see value in solving the above, or are thinking of how to solve this, come visit us in Moscone North - Oracle Red Lounge or in the Engineered Systems Showcase.

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