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• Expanding the Partner Ecosystem with Third-Party Plug-ins

  - by Joe Diemer

  Oracle Enterprise Manager’s extensibility capabilities are designed to allow customers and partners to adapt Enterprise Manager for management of heterogeneous environments with Plug-ins and Connectors.  Third-party developers continue to take advantage of Oracle Enterprise Manager’s Extensibility Development Kit (EDK) to build plug-ins to Enterprise Manager 12c, such as F5’s BIG IP Plug-in and Entuity’s Eye of the Storm Network Management Plug-In.  Partners can also validate their plug-ins through the Oracle Validated Integration (OVI) program, which assures customers that the plug-in has been tested and is functionally and technically sound, is designed in a reliable and standardized manner, and operates and performs as documented.   Two very recent examples of partners which have beta versions of their plug-ins are Blue Medora's VMware vSphere plug-in and the NetApp Storage plug-in.  VMware vSphere Plug-in by Blue Medora Blue Medora, an Oracle Partner Network (OPN) “Gold” member, which just announced that it is now signing up customers to try a beta version of their new VMware vSphere plug-in for Enterprise Manager 12c.  According to Blue Medora, the vSphere plug-in monitors critical VMware metrics (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, etc) at the Host, VM, Cluster and Resource Pool levels.  It has minimal performance impact via an “agentless” approach that requires no installation directly on VMware servers.  It has discovery capabilities for VMware Datacenters, ESX Hosts, Clusters, Virtual Machines, and Datastores.  It offers integration of native VMware Events into Enterprise Manager, and it provides over 300 VMware-related health, availability, performance, and configuration metrics.  It comes with more than 30 out-of-the-box pre-defined thresholds and can manage VMware via a series of jobs split between cluster, host and VM target types.The company reports that the Enterprise Manager 12c plug-in supports vSphere versions 4.0, 4.5 and 5.0.  Platforms supported include Linux 64-bit, Windows, AIX and Solaris SPARC and x86.  Information about the plug-in, including how to sign up for the beta, is available at their web site at http://bluemedora.com after selecting the "Products" tab. NetApp Storage Plug-in NetApp believes the combination of storage system monitoring with comprehensive management of Oracle systems with Enterprise Manager will help customers reduce the cost and complexity of managing applications that rely on NetApp storage and Oracle technologies.  So, NetApp built a plug-in and reports that it has comprehensive availability and performance information for NetApp storage systems.  Using the plug-in, Oracle Enterprise Manager customers with NetApp storage solutions can track the association between databases and storage components and thereby respond to faults and IO performance bottlenecks quickly. With the latest configuration management capabilities, one can also perform drift analysis to make sure all storage systems are configured as per established gold standards. The company is also now signing up beta customers, which can be done at the NetApp Communities site at https://communities.netapp.com/groups/netapp-storage-system-plug-in-for-oem12c-beta. Learn More about Enterprise Manager Extensibility More plug-ins from other partners are soon to come, which I'll be reporting on them here.  To learn more about Enterprise Manager and how customers and partners can build plug-ins using the EDK to manage a multi-vendor data center, go to http://oracle.com/enterprisemanager in the Heterogeneous Management solution area.  The site also lists the plug-ins available with information on how to obtain them.  More info about the Oracle Validated Integration program can be found at the OPN Enterprise Manager Knowledge Zone in the "Develop" tab.

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• My Dog, Cross-Channel Shopping, and Fusion SCM

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Mark Carson, Director, Oracle Fusion Supply Chain Management I was walking my dog Max in an open space behind my house. As we tromped through the tall weeds I remembered it is tick season and that I should get Max some protection. While he sniffed merrily in the tick infested brush, I started shopping in the middle of an open field on my phone. I thought it would be convenient to pick up the tick medicine from a pet store on the way home. Searching the pet store website I saw that they had the medicine, but there was no information on whether the store had any in stock and there were no options for shipping it to the store for pickup. I could return it, but not pick it up which seamed kind of odd. I really didn't feel like making calls to the local stores to find out if they had it. Since the product is popular, I tried one of the large 'everything' stores. Browsing its website I could see that it could be shipped to me, shipped to the store for free, and that the store nearest to me had it in stock. Needless to say, this store became a better option. This experience is a small example of why retailers, distributors, and manufactures have placed a high priority on enabling 'cross-channel commerce.' Shoppers like you and me expect to be able to search, compare, buy and return products on-line and over the phone using a variety of devices including PDAs, tablets and in-store kiosks. The pet store lost my business because its web channel had limited information about its stores. I have spoken with many customers and prospects about cross-channel commerce. They all realize the business implications and urgency behind cross-channel commerce but recognize there are challenges to enable it. New and existing applications must be integrated together globally through a consistent cross-channel business process. Integration is required between applications that provide the initial shopping experience and delivery applications associated with warehouses, stores, and partners. The enablement must be accomplished in a flexible way to react to fast-changing product portfolios and new acquisitions, while at the same time minimizing costs through reuse of existing systems. Meanwhile, the business must continue to grow and decision makers need to balance new capability with peak seasons. The challenges above are not unique to retail. Any customer in any industry who has multiple points for capturing orders and multiple points for fulfilling orders will face these challenges. With this in mind, we had a unique opportunity in Fusion SCM to re-think how to build a set of modular and flexible applications in the order management space that would make these challenges easier to conquer. The results are Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising. These applications can help companies, such as the pet store, enable true cross-channel commerce. The apps provide highly adaptable and flexible business processes to automate order orchestration across multiple cross-channel systems. They also show a global view of supply across warehouses, stores, and partners for real-time availability and more accurate order promising. Additional capability includes a standards-based integration framework for seamless execution and the ability to reuse existing systems for faster and lower cost implementations. OK, that was a mouthful of features and benefits. As Max waited to cross the street (he can do basic math too), I wondered if he could relate. He does not care about leash laws, pick-up courtesy, where he can/can't walk, what time of day it is, or even ticks. He does not care about how all these things could make walking complicated. He just wants to walk. Similarly, customers just want to shop and companies just want to make it easier to sell and deliver. You can learn more about Distributed Order Orchestration and Global Order Promising in cross-channel here.

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• Oracle MDM Maturity Model

  - by David Butler

  A few weeks ago, I discussed the results of a survey conducted by Oracle’s Insight team. The survey was based on the data management maturity model that the Oracle Insight team has developed over the years as they analyzed customer IT organizations to help them get more out of everything they already have. I thought you might like to learn more about the maturity model itself. It can help you figure out where you stand when it comes to getting your organizations data management act together. The model covers maturity levels around five key areas: Profiling data sources; Defining a data strategy; Defining a data consolidation plan; Data maintenance; and Data utilization. Profile data sources: Profiling data sources involves taking an inventory of all data sources from across your IT landscape. Then evaluate the quality of the data in each source system. This enables the scoping of what data to collect into an MDM hub and what rules are needed to insure data harmonization across systems. Define data strategy: A data strategy requires an understanding of the data usage. Given data usage, various data governance requirements need to be developed. This includes data controls and security rules as well as data structure and usage policies. Define data consolidation strategy: Consolidation requires defining your operational data model. How integration is to be accomplished. Cross referencing common data attributes from multiple systems is needed. Synchronization policies also need to be developed. Data maintenance: The desired standardization needs to be defined, including what constitutes a ‘match’ once the data has been standardized. Cleansing rules are a part of this methodology. Data quality monitoring requirements also need to be defined. Utilize the data: What data gets published, and who consumes the data must be determined. How to get the right data to the right place in the right format given its intended use must be understood. Validating the data and insuring security rules are in place and enforced are crucial aspects for full no-risk data utilization. For each of the above data management areas, a maturity level needs to be assessed. Where your organization wants to be should also be identified using the same maturity levels. This results in a sound gap analysis your organization can use to create action plans to achieve the ultimate goals. Marginal is the lowest level. It is characterized by manually maintaining trusted sources; lacking or inconsistent, silo’d structures with limited integration, and gaps in automation. Stable is the next leg up the MDM maturity staircase. It is characterized by tactical MDM implementations that are limited in scope and target a specific division.  It includes limited data stewardship capabilities as well. Best Practice is a serious MDM maturity level characterized by process automation improvements. The scope is enterprise wide. It is a business solution that provides a single version of the truth, with closed-loop data quality capabilities. It is typically driven by an enterprise architecture group with both business and IT representation.   Transformational is the highest MDM maturity level. At this level, MDM is quantitatively managed. It is integrated with Business Intelligence, SOA, and BPM. MDM is leveraged in business process orchestration. Take an inventory using this MDM Maturity Model and see where you are in your journey to full MDM maturity with all the business benefits that accrue to organizations who have mastered their data for the benefit of all operational applications, business processes, and analytical systems. To learn more, Trevor Naidoo and I have written the Oracle MDM Maturity Model whitepaper. It’s free, so go ahead and download it and use it as you see fit.

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• Organization &amp; Architecture UNISA Studies &ndash; Chap 6

  - by MarkPearl

  Learning Outcomes Discuss the physical characteristics of magnetic disks Describe how data is organized and accessed on a magnetic disk Discuss the parameters that play a role in the performance of magnetic disks Describe different optical memory devices Magnetic Disk The way data is stored on and retried from magnetic disks Data is recorded on and later retrieved form the disk via a conducting coil named the head (in many systems there are two heads) The writ mechanism exploits the fact that electricity flowing through a coil produces a magnetic field. Electric pulses are sent to the write head, and the resulting magnetic patterns are recorded on the surface below with different patterns for positive and negative currents The physical characteristics of a magnetic disk   Summarize from book   The factors that play a role in the performance of a disk Seek time – the time it takes to position the head at the track Rotational delay / latency – the time it takes for the beginning of the sector to reach the head Access time – the sum of the seek time and rotational delay Transfer time – the time it takes to transfer data RAID The rate of improvement in secondary storage performance has been considerably less than the rate for processors and main memory. Thus secondary storage has become a bit of a bottleneck. RAID works on the concept that if one disk can be pushed so far, additional gains in performance are to be had by using multiple parallel components. Points to note about RAID… RAID is a set of physical disk drives viewed by the operating system as a single logical drive Data is distributed across the physical drives of an array in a scheme known as striping Redundant disk capacity is used to store parity information, which guarantees data recoverability in case of a disk failure (not supported by RAID 0 or RAID 1) Interesting to note that the increase in the number of drives, increases the probability of failure. To compensate for this decreased reliability RAID makes use of stored parity information that enables the recovery of data lost due to a disk failure.   The RAID scheme consists of 7 levels…   Category Level Description Disks Required Data Availability Large I/O Data Transfer Capacity Small I/O Request Rate Striping 0 Non Redundant N Lower than single disk Very high Very high for both read and write Mirroring 1 Mirrored 2N Higher than RAID 2 – 5 but lower than RAID 6 Higher than single disk Up to twice that of a signle disk for read Parallel Access 2 Redundant via Hamming Code N + m Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Parallel Access 3 Bit interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Highest of all listed alternatives Approximately twice that of a single disk Independent Access 4 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than single disk for write Independent Access 5 Block interleaved parity N + 1 Much higher than single disk Similar to RAID 0 for read, lower than single disk for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, generally  lower than single disk for write Independent Access 6 Block interleaved parity N + 2 Highest of all listed alternatives Similar to RAID 0 for read; lower than RAID 5 for write Similar to RAID 0 for read, significantly lower than RAID 5  for write   Read page 215 – 221 for detailed explanation on RAID levels Optical Memory There are a variety of optical-disk systems available. Read through the table on page 222 – 223 Some of the devices include… CD CD-ROM CD-R CD-RW DVD DVD-R DVD-RW Blue-Ray DVD Magnetic Tape Most modern systems use serial recording – data is lade out as a sequence of bits along each track. The typical recording used in serial is referred to as serpentine recording. In this technique when data is being recorded, the first set of bits is recorded along the whole length of the tape. When the end of the tape is reached the heads are repostioned to record a new track, and the tape is again recorded on its whole length, this time in the opposite direction. That process continued back and forth until the tape is full. To increase speed, the read-write head is capable of reading and writing a number of adjacent tracks simultaneously. Data is still recorded serially along individual tracks, but blocks in sequence are stored on adjacent tracks as suggested. A tape drive is a sequential access device. Magnetic tape was the first kind of secondary memory. It is still widely used as the lowest-cost, slowest speed member of the memory hierarchy.

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• Customers Discuss: Real-World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate

  - by Irem Radzik

  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} As businesses leverage business intelligence and analytics for day-to-day decision making, operational reporting solutions become more and more common. While some companies can use their production OLTP system for running operational reports, for many it is too much overhead and performance impact for transaction processing systems.  Oracle GoldenGate’s real-time data integration capabilities enable companies to create a real-time replica of their OLTP systems, dedicated for operational reporting. This instance can be optimized for the reports needed as well such as containing only the tables needed from the source. Oracle GoldenGate has certified solutions for many Oracle applications such as EBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, to offload operational reporting to another reporting server that has real-time data feeding from the production system. At Oracle OpenWorld we will be hearing from a panel of Oracle GoldenGate customers how they deployed GoldenGate for operational reporting. Comcast, Turk Telekom, and Raymond James will be sharing their experiences and the benefits achieved when implementing GoldenGate’s solution. If you have performance degradation in your production systems due to reporting or ad-hoc queries, and you will be at OpenWorld, don’t miss this informative session: Real-World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate: Customer Panel-- Tuesday Oct 2nd 11:45am Mascone West 3005. For other data integration sessions at OpenWorld, please check our Focus-On document.  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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} If you cannot attend OpenWorld, please check out related white paper “Using Oracle GoldenGate to Achieve Operational Reporting for Oracle Applications” to learn more.

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• Taking HRMS to the Cloud to Simplify Human Resources Management

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Anke Mogannam With human capital management (HCM) a top-of-mind issue for executives in every industry, human resources (HR) organizations are poised to have their day in the sun—proving not just their administrative worth but their strategic value as well.  To make good on that promise, however, HR must modernize. Indeed, if HR is to act as an agent of change—providing the swift reallocation of employees  and the rapid absorption of employee data required for enterprises to shift course on a dime—it must first deal with the disruptive change at its own front door. And increasingly, that means choosing the right technology and human resources management system (HRMS) for managing the entire employee lifecycle. Unfortunately, for most organizations, this task has proved easier said than done. This is because while much has been written about advances in HRMS technology, until recently, most of those advances took the form of disparate on-premises solutions designed to serve very specific purposes. Although this may have resulted in key competencies in certain areas, it also meant that processes for core HR functions like payroll and benefits were being carried out in separate systems from those used for talent management, workforce optimization, training, and so on. With no integration—and no single system of record—processes were disconnected, ease of use was impeded, user experience was diminished, and vital data was left untapped.  Today, however, that scenario has begun to change, and end-to-end cloud-based HCM solutions have moved from wished-for innovations to real-life solutions. Why, then, have HR organizations been so slow in adopting them? The answer—it would seem—is, “It’s complicated.” So complicated, in fact, that 45 percent of the respondents to PwC’s “Annual HR Technology Survey” (for 2013) reported having no formal HR software roadmap, and 40 percent stated that they “did not know” whether their organizations would be increasing their use of cloud or software as a service (SaaS) for HR.  Clearly, HR organizations need help sorting through the morass of HR software options confronting them. But just as clearly, there’s an enormous opportunity awaiting those that do. The trick will come in charting a course that allows HR to leverage existing technology while investing in the cloud-based solutions that will deliver the end-to-end processes, easy-to-understand analytics, and superior adaptability required to simplify—and add value to—every aspect of employee management. The Opportunity therefore is to cut costs, drive Innovation, and increase engagement by moving to cloud-based HCM.  Then you will benefit from one Interface, leverage many access points, and  gain at-a-glance insight across your entire workforce. With many legacy on-premises HR systems not being efficient anymore and cloud-based, integrated systems that span the range of HR functions finally reaching maturity, the time is ripe for moving core HR to the cloud. Indeed, for the first time ever there are more HRMS replacement initiatives than HRMS upgrade initiatives under way, and the majority of them involve moving to the cloud per Cedar Crestone’s 2013-2014 HRMS survey. To learn how you can launch your own cloud HCM initiative and begin using HR to power the enterprise, visit Oracle HRMS in the Cloud and Oracle’s new customer 2 cloud program. Anke Mogannam brings more than 16 years of marketing and human capital management experience in the technology industries to her role at Oracle where she is part of the Human Capital Management applications marketing team. In that role, Anke drives content marketing, messaging, go-to-market activities, integrated marketing campaigns, and field enablement. Prior to joining Oracle, Anke held several roles in communications, marketing, HCM product strategy and product management at PeopleSoft, SAP, Workday and Saba. Follow her on Twitter @amogannam

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• Replicating between Cloud and On-Premises using Oracle GoldenGate

  - by Ananth R. Tiru

  Do you have applications running on the cloud that you need to connect with the on premises systems. The most likely answer to this question is an astounding YES!  If so, then you understand the importance of keep the data fresh at all times across the cloud and on-premises environments. This is also one of the key focus areas for the new GoldenGate 12c release which we announced couple of week ago via a press release. Most enterprises have spent years avoiding the data “silos” that inhibit productivity. For example, an enterprise which has adopted a CRM strategy could be relying on an on-premises based marketing application used for developing and nurturing leads. At the same time it could be using a SaaS based Sales application to create opportunities and quotes. The sales and the marketing teams which use these systems need to be able to access and share the data in a reliable and cohesive way. This example can be extended to other applications areas such as HR, Supply Chain, and Finance and the demands the users place on getting a consistent view of the data. When it comes to moving data in hybrid environments some of the key requirements include minimal latency, reliability and security: Data must remain fresh. As data ages it becomes less relevant and less valuable—day-old data is often insufficient in today’s competitive landscape. Reliability must be guaranteed despite system or connectivity issues that can occur between the cloud and on-premises instances. Security is a key concern when replicating between cloud and on-premises instances. There are several options to consider when replicating between the cloud and on-premises instances. Option 1 – Secured network established between the cloud and on-premises A secured network is established between the cloud and on-premises which enables the applications (including replication software) running on the cloud and on-premises to have seamless connectivity to other applications irrespective of where they are physically located. Option 2 – Restricted network established between the cloud and on-premises A restricted network is established between the cloud and on-premises instances which enable certain ports (required by replication) be opened on both the cloud and on the on-premises instances and white lists the IP addresses of the cloud and on-premises instances. Option 3 – Restricted network access from on-premises and cloud through HTTP proxy This option can be considered when the ports required by the applications (including replication software) are not open and the cloud instance is not white listed on the on-premises instance. This option of tunneling through HTTP proxy may be only considered when proper security exceptions are obtained. Oracle GoldenGate Oracle GoldenGate is used for major Fortune 500 companies and other industry leaders worldwide to support mission-critical systems for data availability and integration. Oracle GoldenGate addresses the requirements for ensuring data consistency between cloud and on-premises instances, thus facilitating the business process to run effectively and reliably. The architecture diagram below illustrates the scenario where the cloud and the on-premises instance are connected using GoldenGate through a secured network In the above scenario, Oracle GoldenGate is installed and configured on both the cloud and the on-premises instances. On the cloud instance Oracle GoldenGate is installed and configured on the machine where the database instance can be accessed. Oracle GoldenGate can be configured for unidirectional or bi-directional replication between the cloud and on premises instances. The specific configuration details of Oracle GoldenGate processes will depend upon the option selected for establishing connectivity between the cloud and on-premises instances. The knowledge article (ID - 1588484.1) titled ' Replicating between Cloud and On-Premises using Oracle GoldenGate' discusses in detail the options for replicating between the cloud and on-premises instances. The article can be found on My Oracle Support. To learn more about Oracle GoldenGate 12c register for our launch webcast where we will go into these new features in more detail.   You may also want to download our white paper "Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 1 New Features Overview" I would love to hear your requirements for replicating between on-premises and cloud instances, as well as your comments about the strategy discussed in the knowledge article to address your needs. Please post your comments in this blog or in the Oracle GoldenGate public forum - https://forums.oracle.com/community/developer/english/business_intelligence/system_management_and_integration/goldengate

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• ARTS Reference Model for Retail

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Consider a hypothetical scenario where you have been tasked to set up retail operations for a electronic goods or daily consumables or a luxury brand etc. It is very likely you will be faced with the following questions: What are the essential business capabilities that you must have in place?  What are the essential business activities under-pinning each of the business capabilities, identified in Step 1? What are the set of steps that you need to perform to execute each of the business activities, identified in Step 2? Answers to the above will drive your investments in software and hardware to enable the core retail operations. More importantly, the choices you make in responding to the above questions will several implications in the short-run and in the long-run. In the short-term, you will incur the time and cost of defining your technology requirements, procuring the software/hardware components and getting them up and running. In the long-term, as you grow in operations organically or through M&A, partnerships and franchiser business models  you will invariably need to make more technology investments to manage the greater complexity (scale and scope) of business operations.  "As new software applications, such as time & attendance, labor scheduling, and POS transactions, just to mention a few, are introduced into the store environment, it takes a disproportionate amount of time and effort to integrate them with existing store applications. These integration projects can add up to 50 percent to the time needed to implement a new software application and contribute significantly to the cost of the overall project, particularly if a systems integrator is called in. This has been the reality that all retailers have had to live with over the last two decades. The effect of the environment has not only been to increase costs, but also to limit retailers' ability to implement change and the speed with which they can do so." (excerpt taken from here) Now, one would think a lot of retailers would have already gone through the pain of finding answers to these questions, so why re-invent the wheel? Precisely so, a major effort began almost 17 years ago in the retail industry to make it less expensive and less difficult to deploy new technology in stores and at the retail enterprise level. This effort is called the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). Without standards such as those defined by ARTS, you would very likely end up experiencing the following: Increased Time and Cost due to resource wastage arising from re-inventing the wheel i.e. re-creating vanilla processes from scratch, and incurring, otherwise avoidable, mistakes and errors by ignoring experience of others Sub-optimal Process Efficiency due to narrow, isolated view of processes thereby ignoring process inter-dependencies i.e. optimizing parts but not the whole, and resulting in lack of transparency and inter-departmental finger-pointing Embracing ARTS standards as a blue-print for establishing or managing or streamlining your retail operations can benefit you in the following ways: Improved Time-to-Market from parity with industry best-practice processes e.g. ARTS, thus avoiding “reinventing the wheel” for common retail processes and focusing more on customizing processes for differentiations, and lowering integration complexity and risk with a standardized vocabulary for exchange between internal and external i.e. partner systems Lower Operating Costs by embracing the ARTS enterprise-wide process reference model for developing and streamlining retail operations holistically instead of a narrow, silo-ed view, and  procuring IT systems in compliance with ARTS thus avoiding IT budget marginalization While parity with industry standards such as ARTS business process model by itself does not create a differentiation, it does however provide a higher starting point for bridging the strategy-execution gap in setting up and improving retail operations.

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• The long road to bug-free software

  - by Tony Davis

  The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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• College Ratings via the Federal Government

  - by user9147039

  A few weeks back you might remember news about a higher education rating system proposal from the Obama administration. As I've discussed previously, political and stakeholder pressures to improve outcomes and increase transparency are stronger than ever before. The executive branch proposal is intended to make progress in this area. Quoting from the proposal itself, "The ratings will be based upon such measures as: Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants; Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and Outcomes, such as graduation and transfer rates, graduate earnings, and advanced degrees of college graduates.” This is going to be quite complex, to say the least. Most notably, higher ed is not monolithic. From community and other 2-year colleges, to small private 4-year, to professional schools, to large public research institutions…the many walks of higher ed life are, well, many. Designing a ratings system that doesn't wind up with lots of unintended consequences and collateral damage will be difficult. At best you would end up potentially tarnishing the reputation of certain institutions that were actually performing well against the metrics and outcome measures that make sense in their "context" of education. At worst you could spend a lot of time and resources designing a system that would lose credibility with its "customers". A lot of institutions I work with already have in place systems like the one described above. They are tracking completion rates, completion timeframes, transfers to other institutions, job placement, and salary information. As I talk to these institutions there are several constants worth noting: • Deciding on which metrics to measure is complicated. While employment and salary data are relatively easy to track, qualitative measures are more difficult. How do you quantify the benefit to someone who studies in one field that may not compensate him or her as well as another field but that provides huge personal fulfillment and reward is a difficult measure to quantify? • The data is available but the systems to transform the data into actual information that can be used in meaningful ways are not. Too often in higher ed information is siloed. As such, much of the data that need to be a part of a comprehensive system sit in multiple organizations, oftentimes outside the reach of core IT. • Politics and culture are big barriers. One of the areas that my team and I spend a lot of time talking about with higher ed institutions all over the world is the imperative to optimize for student success. This, like the tracking of the students’ achievement after graduation, requires a level or organizational capacity that does not currently exist. The primary barrier is the culture of "data islands" in higher ed, and the need for leadership to drive out the divisions between departments, schools, colleges, etc. and institute academy-wide analytics and data stewardship initiatives that will enable student success. • Data quality is a very big issue. So many disparate systems exist (some on premise, some "in the cloud") that keep data about "persons" using different means to identify them. Establishing a single source of truth about an individual and his or her data is difficult without some type of data quality policy and tools. Good tools actually exist but are seldom leveraged. Don't misunderstand - I think it's a great idea to drive additional transparency and accountability into the system of higher education. And not just at home, but globally. Students and parents need access to key data to make informed, responsible choices. The tools exist to not only enable this kind of information to be shared but to capture the very metrics stakeholders care most about and in a way that makes sense in the context of a given institution's "place" in the overall higher ed panoply.

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• The long road to bug-free software

  - by Tony Davis

  The past decade has seen a burgeoning interest in functional programming languages such as Haskell or, in the Microsoft world, F#. Though still on the periphery of mainstream programming, functional programming concepts are gradually seeping into the imperative C# language (for example, Lambda expressions have their root in functional programming). One of the more interesting concepts from functional programming languages is the use of formal methods, the lofty ideal behind which is bug-free software. The idea is that we write a specification that describes exactly how our function (say) should behave. We then prove that our function conforms to it, and in doing so have proved beyond any doubt that it is free from bugs. All programmers already use one form of specification, specifically their programming language's type system. If a value has a specific type then, in a type-safe language, the compiler guarantees that value cannot be an instance of a different type. Many extensions to existing type systems, such as generics in Java and .NET, extend the range of programs that can be type-checked. Unfortunately, type systems can only prevent some bugs. To take a classic problem of retrieving an index value from an array, since the type system doesn't specify the length of the array, the compiler has no way of knowing that a request for the "value of index 4" from an array of only two elements is "unsafe". We restore safety via exception handling, but the ideal type system will prevent us from doing anything that is unsafe in the first place and this is where we start to borrow ideas from a language such as Haskell, with its concept of "dependent types". If the type of an array includes its length, we can ensure that any index accesses into the array are valid. The problem is that we now need to carry around the length of arrays and the values of indices throughout our code so that it can be type-checked. In general, writing the specification to prove a positive property, even for a problem very amenable to specification, such as a simple sorting algorithm, turns out to be very hard and the specification will be different for every program. Extend this to writing a specification for, say, Microsoft Word and we can see that the specification would end up being no simpler, and therefore no less buggy, than the implementation. Fortunately, it is easier to write a specification that proves that a program doesn't have certain, specific and undesirable properties, such as infinite loops or accesses to the wrong bit of memory. If we can write the specifications to prove that a program is immune to such problems, we could reuse them in many places. The problem is the lack of specification "provers" that can do this without a lot of manual intervention (i.e. hints from the programmer). All this might feel a very long way off, but computing power and our understanding of the theory of "provers" advances quickly, and Microsoft is doing some of it already. Via their Terminator research project they have started to prove that their device drivers will always terminate, and in so doing have suddenly eliminated a vast range of possible bugs. This is a huge step forward from saying, "we've tested it lots and it seems fine". What do you think? What might be good targets for specification and verification? SQL could be one: the cost of a bug in SQL Server is quite high given how many important systems rely on it, so there's a good incentive to eliminate bugs, even at high initial cost. [Many thanks to Mike Williamson for guidance and useful conversations during the writing of this piece] Cheers, Tony.

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• java distributed cache for low latency, high availability

  - by Shahbaz

  I've never used distributed caches/DHTs like memcached, jboss cache, ehcache, etc. I'm wondering which, if any, is appropriate for my use. First, I'm not doing web applications (as most of these project seem to be geared towards web apps). I write servers (Order Management Systems actually) for financial trading firms. The servers themselves are not too complicated. They need to receive information (market data, orders, executions, etc.) rout them to their destination while possibly transforming some of these messages. I am looking at these products to solve the following problems: * Safe repository of the state of the server. I'd rather build the logic of my application as a bunch of transformers (similar to Apache Camel) and store the state in a 'safe' place * This repository should be distributed: in case one of these data stores crashes, one or two more should be up and I should be able to switch to them seamlessly * This repository should be fast. Single digits milliseconds count here, in other words, systems which consume/process this data are automated systems, not humans clicking on links. This system needs to have high-throughput and low latency. By sending my data outside the process, I am necessarily slowing performance, but I am trying to balance absolute raw speed and absolute protection of data. * This repository should be safe. Similar to the point about several on-line backups, this system needs to write data to disk (potentially more than one disk). I'd really like to stop writing my own 'transaction servers.' Am I correct to be looking into projects such as jboss cache, ehcache, etc.? Thanks

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• Linux System Programming

  - by AJ

  I wanted to get into systems programming for linux and wanted to know how to approach that and where to begin. I come from a web development background (Python, PHP) but I also know some C and C++. Essentially, I would like to know: Which language(s) to learn and pursue (I think mainly C and C++)? How/Where to learn those languages specific to Systems Programming? Books, websites, blogs, tutorials etc. Any other good places where I can start this from basics? Any good libraries to begin with? What environment setup (or approx.) do I need? Assuming linux has to be there but I have a linux box which I rarely log into using GUI (always use SSH). Is GUI a lot more helpful or VI editor is enough? (Please let me know if this part of the question should go to serverfault.com) PS: Just to clarify, by systems programming I mean things like writing device drivers, System tools, write native applications which are not present on Linux platform but are on others, play with linux kernel etc.

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• TCL tDom Empty XML Tag

  - by pws5068

  I'm using tDom to loop through some XML and pull out each element's text(). set xml { <systems> <object> <type>Hardware</type> <name>Server Name</name> <attributes> <vendor></vendor> </attributes> </object> <object> <type>Hardware</type> <name>Server Two Name</name> <attributes> <vendor></vendor> </attributes> </object> </systems> }; set doc [dom parse $xml] set root [$doc documentElement] set nodeList [$root selectNodes /systems/object] foreach node $nodeList { set nType [$node selectNodes type/text()] set nName [$node selectNodes name/text()] set nVendor [$node selectNodes attributes/vendor/text()] # Etc... puts "Type: " puts [$nType data] # Etc .. puts [$nVendor data] } But when it tries to print out the Vendor, which is empty, it thows the error invalid command name "". How can I ignore this and just set $nVendor to an empty string?

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• What would it take to get auto-revert-mode to actually work in my dired buffer?

  - by Cheeso

  Apparently auto-revert-mode is supposed to work in dired buffers. I had never heard of this, but the doc says it works. Then I read a little more and found some fine print: Auto-reverting Dired buffers currently works on GNU or Unix style operating systems. It may not work satisfactorily on some other systems. ...and... [dired buffers] do not auto-revert when information about a particular file changes (e.g. when the size changes) or when inserted subdirectories change. To be sure that all listed information is up to date, you have to manually revert using g, even if auto-reverting is enabled in the Dired buffer. source Well, uh, gee.... That doesn't sound like autorevert to me. What would it take to get auto-revert for dired to actually work? Even on (gasp) non-Unix operating systems. Could I just modify auto-revert-handler to call revert-buffer on dired buffers?

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• Upload using python script takes very long on one laptop as compared to another

  - by Engr Am

  I have a python 2.7 code which uses STORBINARY function for uploading files to an ftp server and RETRBINARY for downloading from this server. However, the issue is the upload is taking a very long time on three laptops from different brands as compared to a Dell laptop. The strange part is when I manually upload any file, it takes the same time on all the systems. The manual upload rate and upload rate with the python script is the same on the Dell Laptop. However, on every other brand of laptop (I have tried with IBM, Toshiba, Fujitsu-Siemens) the python script has a very low upload rate than the manual attempt. Also, on all these other laptops, the upload rate using the python script is the same (1Mbit/s) while the manual upload rate is approx. 8 Mbit/s. I have tried to vary the filesize for the upload to no avail. TCP Optimizer improved the download rate on all the systems but had no effect on the upload rate. Download rate using this script on all the systems is fine and same as the manual download rate. I have checked the server and it has more than 90% free space. The network connection is the same for all the laptops, and I try uploading only with one laptop at a time. All the laptops have almost the same system configurations, same operating system and approximately the same free drive space. If anything the Dell laptop is a little less in terms of processing power and RAM than 2 of the others, but I suppose this has no effect as I have checked many times to see how much was the CPU usage and network usage during these uploads and downloads, and I am sure that no other virus or program has been eating up my bandwidth. Here is the code ('ftp' and 'file_path' are inputs to the function): path,filename=os.path.split(file_path) filesize=os.path.getsize(file_path) deffilesize=(filesize/1024)/1024 f = open(file_path, "rb") upstart = time.clock() print ftp.storbinary("STOR "+filename, f) upende = time.clock()-upstart outname="Upload " f.close() return upende, deffilesize, outname

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• What does it mean for an OS to "execute within user processes"? Do any modern OS's use that approach

  - by Chris Cooper

  I have recently become interested in operating system, and a friend of mine lent me a book called Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles (I have the third edition), published in 1998. It's been a very interesting book so far, but I have come to the part dealing with process control, and it's using UNIX System V as one of its examples of an operating system that executes within user processes. This concept has struck me as a little strange. First of all, does this mean that OS instructions and data are stored in each user of the processes? Probably not, because that would be an absurdly redundant scheme. But if not, then what does it mean to "execute within" a user process? Do any modern operating systems use this approach? It seems much more logical to have the operating system execute as its own process, or even independently of all processes, if you're short on memory. All the inter-accessiblilty of process data required for this layout seems to greatly complicate things. (But maybe that's just because I don't quite get the concept ;D) Here is what the book says: "Execution within User Processes: An alternative that is common with operation systems on smaller machines is to execute virtually all operating system software in the context of a user process. ... "

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• Integration transport choice (Oracle + SQL Server)

  - by lak-b

  We have several systems with Oracle (A) and SQL Server (B) databases on backend. I have to consolidate data from those systems into the new SQL Server database. Something like that: (A) =>|---------------| | some software | => SQL Server (B) =>|---------------| where some software is: transport (A and B systems located in the network) processing business logic (custom .NET code) Due to first point, I need some queue software or something similar (like MSMQ, Service Broker or something). In another hand, I can implement a web-service instead of queue. (A) =>|---------------|-------------| | queue/service | custom code | => SQL Server (B) =>|---------------|-------------| The question is: which queue/transport framework should I use with Oracle and SQL Server databases? It would be nice, if I can post messages to MSMQ in both Oracle and SQL Server stored procedures (can I?) It would be nice, if I can call a web-service in both Oracle and SQL Server stored procedures (can I?) It would be nice, if I can use something similar in both Oracle and SQL Server stored procedures (what exactly?) What software should I prefer to my requirements?

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• Mgmt wants to re-title my position: Any help...? [closed]

  - by JohnFlyTN

  Management here wants to re-title my position, since I'm doing quite a bit of different work than was originally planned. They want my input. After a quick glance over my skill set and job duties, what would we need to describe this position as? I'll just list things I'm at least proficient in, I will not list things I have a passing knowledge of. About me : ~10 years software development. Languages : C, C++, Perl, PHP, C#, TCL, Unix shell scripting, SQL (TSQL, PLSQL) Systems : MS-Dos, Windows 3.1 to 7 for client, NT 4 to 2008 for server, OS/2, IBM MVS & z/OS, Linux ( multiple distros), AIX Current position: I do all sorts of in-house software. The range is single user apps to large systems spanning multiple OS's. One of the larger projects I've designed and coded is about 100k lines of C#, and a database where I have been the sole designer and maintainer. I have near total freedom to design as I see fit, restraints are usually budgetary. Skills required to replace me in my current role: Windows and Unix admin, Database design, .NET up to 3.5 (C#, ASP.NET), C++, Perl, good skills in designing large and efficient data processing systems. Given this small level of information what would you see this as being titled? (is more information required to render a decision?)

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• Is there a free, smale-scale, not web-based issue/bug tracking system?

  - by Doc Brown

  I know, there were posts before here on SO before concerning issue or bug tracking systems, like this one, but the given answers point either to commercial systems or web-based systems, which both seem to be oversized for our needs. What I am looking for is a non-commercial tool for a team of 3 to 4 developers, which can be used on an existing fileserver, without the need of installing additional server software like a C/S database or a web server. Some things I expect from such a system: allows to remember bugs (with a priority) and issues / ideas for new features (mostly without a priority) description of the issue, perhaps some additional remarks short info who entered the bug/issue entry one or more tags allowing us to group or filter the list Any suggestions? EDIT: I should have said that, but we are using MS Windows clients, Visual Studio development, Tortoise SVN (the latter works fine without a subversion server). And yes, I am strict on "no server software", since all server based solutions I have seen so far seem much to oversized/heavy weighted/too-much-effort-to-be-worth-it. In fact, if no one has a better idea, we are going to use a spreadsheet, but I can't believe there are no ready-made, light weight solutions.

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• Storing "binary" data type in C program

  - by puchu

  I need to create a program that converts one number system to other number systems. I used itoa in Windows (Dev C++) and my only problem is that I do not know how to convert binary numbers to other number systems. All the other number systems conversion work accordingly. Does this involve something like storing the input to be converted using %? Here is a snippet of my work: case 2: { printf("\nEnter a binary number: "); scanf("%d", &num); itoa(num,buffer,8); printf("\nOctal %s",buffer); itoa(num,buffer,10); printf("\nDecimal %s",buffer); itoa(num,buffer,16); printf("\nHexadecimal %s \n",buffer); break; } For decimal I used %d, for octal I used %o and for hexadecimal I used %x. What could be the correct one for binary? Thanks for future answers!

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• Install McAfee ePO Agent via Group Policy

  - by neildeadman

  We have recently deployed ePO to our infrastructure, but the Agent will not deploy to all systems. We suspect this is a firewall issue as disabing Windows Firewall generally makes it work. We have decided to install the Agent via Group Policy to make sure all systems get the it and then ePO will deploy VirusScan on reboot. Following the manual I have run: Framepkg.exe /gengpomsi /SiteInfo=<sharedpath>\SiteList.xml /FrmInstLogLoc=<localtempDir> \<filename>.log and then created the GPO, but it never installs. Has anyone managed to get this working? Or maybe they can suggest a resolution for the failed installs of Agent deploy from ePO?

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• Partitioning recommendations for a Proxmox VM Server (OpenVZ)

  - by luison

  We are new to virtualization and we are planning to turn our online server into a virualized one, mainly for maintenance, backup and recovery improvements. Initially we would only have one real virtual system with load plus 1-3 copys for testing and recovering and maybe a small centralized syslog virtual machine. We would like, if possible the host machine to include an iptables plus rsync to back up to other machines and some other global security systems. Due to this and the offerings of our hosting supplier we are mainly considering Proxmox for its simplicity (we like the idea of its web admin panel) and as I also understand that the container approach of OpenVMZ systems may fit well resource wise with our setup. The base system comes with debian so we can personalise it to our requirements. Proxmox installations default installs an LVM partition for the VMs. Our doubts are with the fact of what would be the best partition structure for this considering that: we would like to have a mirror of the root partition we could boot from if required (our provider supports booting the system from another partition via control panel) we ideally would like to have a partition that could be shared among the VM systems. We still don't know if this is possible directly with OpenVMZ containers, otherwise we are considering doing this by sharing it via NFS on the host machine. we want to use the backup system available on the proxmox host administrator to programme VMs backups and then rsync it to another machine. With this based on a Linux Raid of aprox (750Gb) we are considering something like: ext3_1/ - (20Gb) ext3_2/bak_root - (20Gb) mostly unmounted, root partition sync LVM_1 /var/lib/vz - (390Gb) partition for virtual images LVM_2 /shared_data - (30Gb) LVM_3 /backups - (300Gb) where all backups would be allocated Our initial tests with Proxmox seem to have issues with snapshots backups like this, perhaps caused by the fact that they can not be done to another LVM partition (error: command 'lvcreate --size 1024M --snapshot --name vzsnap-ns204084.XXX.net-0 /dev/pve/LV' failed with exit code 5) in which case we might have to use a standart ext3 partition (but unsure if we can do this with the 4 primary partition limitations). Does this makes more or less sense? Would it be mad to for example write VMs /var/logs to a NFS mounted partition (on the host system)? Are their any other easier ways to mount host system partitions (or folders) to the VMs?

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• gparted installed on OpenSuse shows all file system types as greyed out except for hfs

  - by cmdematos.com

  I have had this problem before and fixed it, but I don't recall how I did it and I did not record it (sadness :( ) I have all the requisite commands installed on OpenSuse to support gparted's efforts in creating any of the supported file systems. I recall that the problem was that gparted could not find the commands, in any event all the file systems are greyed out in the context menu except for the legacy hfs partition which only supports < 2gb. Even extfs2-extfs4 are greyed out. How do I fix this?

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• Immutable hard links on ext3/4?

  - by shovas

  In my research on file versioning at the fs level, snapshotting, and related ideas, I took a look at hard-links and exactly what they are and how they behave. Using rsync you can get a pretty slick poor man's snapshotting system up and running on file systems that don't natively support it. But, can you get immutable hard links on ext3/4 or any other file systems for that matter? My definition for immutable hard link is: A hard link which, when changed on one location, becomes a regular copy and no longer a hard link. I would like this because it would enable snapshotting use of the source data to link against instead of a copy of the data (in the case of the rsync snapshotting technique). I have gigabytes of data that can't be duplicated due to space restrictions but I have enough room if I can intelligently snapshot individual changed files with the rest linked to the source not a copy. Given all that, is there some other technique, feature or technology I'm really looking for?

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