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• Adventures in Lab Management Configuration: Part 2 of 3

  - by Enrique Lima

  The first post was the high level overview. Now it is time for the details on what was done to the existing CMMI Project based on CMMI v 4.2. The first step was to go into Visual Studio, then from the Team Project Collection Settings and then to the Process Template Manager.  Once there, it was a matter of selecting the appropriate template (MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0) and download to a point I could reference later (for example C:\Templates). Then on to using the steps from the guidance post. Since I was using an x64 deployment, I will make reference to the path as <toolpath>, however the actual path to reference in a 64-bit environment is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE”. As I mentioned on the previous post, make sure to first perform a backup of the Configuration, Collection and Warehouse DBs.  If you did not apply any changes to the names and such, then you will find those as tfs_Configuration, tfs_DefaultCollection and tfs_Warehouse. Now, the work needed with the witadmin tool: That includes the uploading of the structures that differ from v4.2 to v5.0 There is likely going to be an issue with the naming of some fields. For example, TFS 2010 likes something along the lines of “Area ID”, whereas TFS 2008 would have had it as “AreaID”.  So, this will need to be corrected.  Some posts will have you go through this after the errors pop up.  I would recommend doing this process prior to executing the importwitd process.  witadmin listfields /collection:<path to collection> > c:\ListFields.txt Review the following fields: AreaID, review the Name property and validate if it states “AreaID”, the you will need to rename the Name field to reflect “Area ID”. ExternalLinkCount, RelatedLinkCount, HyperLinkCount, AttachedFileCount and IterationID would be the other fields to check. To correct the issue, then execute the following: witadmin changefield /collection:<path to collection> /n:"System.ExternalLinkCount" /name:"External Link Count" Repeat for Area ID, Related Link Count, Hyperlink Count, Attached File Count and Iteration ID.  Once this is done, proceed with the commands below. witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p:<project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions\TestCase.xml" witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p:<project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions\SharedStep.xml" witadmin importcategories /collection:<path to collection> /p:<project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\WorkItem Tracking\categories.xml" Modifications to the Bug Definition: First step is to export the existing definition. witadmin exportwitd /collection<path to collection> /p:<project> /n:bug /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyBug.xml" Make modifications to recently exported MyBug.xml file.  Details for the modification are here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff452591.aspx#ModifyTask Once the changes are done, proceed with the import command witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p: <project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyBug.xml" Repeat the process for the the Scenario or Requirement Type Definition witadmin exportwitd /collection<path to collection> /p:<project> /n:requirement /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyRequirement.xml" Make modifications to recently exported MyRequirement.xml file.  Details for the modification are here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff452591.aspx#ModifyTask Once the changes are done, proceed with the import command witadmin importwitd /collection:<path to collection> /p: <project> /f:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\MyRequirement.xml" Provide the Bug Field Mapping definition, after creating the file as specified here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff452591.aspx#TCMBugFieldMapping tcm bugfieldmapping /import /mappingfile:"<path to downloaded template>\MSF for CMMI Process Improvement v5.0\bugfieldmappings.xml" /collection:<path to collection> /teamproject:<project name>

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• Community Branching

  - by Dane Morgridge

  As some may have noticed, I have taken a liking to Ruby (and Rails in particular) quite a bit recently. This last weekend I spoke at the NYC Code Camp on a comparison of ASP.NET and Rails as well as an intro to Entity Framework talk.  I am speaking at RubyNation in April and have submitted to other ruby conferences around the area and I am also doing a Rails and MongoDB talk at the Philly Code Camp in April. Before you start to think this is my "I'm leaving .NET post", which it isn't so I need to clarify. I am not, nor do I intend to any time in the near future plan on abandoning .NET.  I am simply branching out into another community based on a development technology that I very much enjoy.  If you look at my twitter bio, you will see that I am into Entity Framework, Ruby on Rails, C++ and ASP.NET MVC, and not necessarily in that order.  I know you're probably thinking to your self that I am crazy, which is probably true on several levels (especially the C++ part). I was actually crazy enough at the NYC Code Camp to show up wearing a Linux t-shirt, presenting with my MacBook Pro on Entity Framework, ASP.NET MVC and Rails. (I did get pelted in the head with candy by Rachel Appel for it though) At all of the code camps I am submitting to this year, i will be submitting sessions on likely all four topics, and some sessions will be a combination of 2 or more.  For example, my "ASP.NET MVC: A Gateway To Rails?" talk touches ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework Code First and Rails. Simply put (and I talk about this in my MVC & Rails talk) is that learning and using Rails has made me a better ASP.NET MVC developer. Just one example of this is helper methods.  When I started working with ASP.NET MVC, I didn't really want to use helpers and preferred to just use standard html tags, especially where links were concerned.  It was just me being stubborn and not really seeing all of the benefit of the helpers.  To my defense, coming from WebForms, I wanted to be as bare metal as possible and it seemed at first like a lot of the helpers were an unnecessary abstraction. I took my first look at Rails back in v1 and didn't spend very much time with it so I dismissed it and went on my merry ASP.NET WebForms way.  Then I picked up ASP.NET MVC and grasped the MVC pattern itself much better. After this, I took another look at Rails and everything made sense.  I decided then to learn Rails. (I think it is important for developers to learn new languages and platforms regularly so it was a natural progression for me) I wanted to learn it the right way, so when I dug into code, everyone used helpers everywhere for pretty much everything possible. I took some time to dig in and found out how helpful they were and subsequently realized how awesome they were in ASP.NET MVC also and started using them. In short, I love Rails (and Ruby in general).  I also love ASP.NET MVC and Entity Framework and yes I still love C++.  I have varying degrees of love for them individually at any given moment and it is likely to shift based on the current project I am working on.  I know you're thinking it so before you ask the question. "Which do I use when?", I'm going to give the standard developer answer of: It depends.  There are a lot of factors that I am not going to even go into that would go into a decision.  The most basic question I would ask though is,  does this project depend on .NET?  If it does, then I'd say that ASP.NET MVC is probably going to be the more logical choice and I am going to leave it at that.  I am working on projects right now in both technologies and I don't see that changing anytime soon (one project even uses both). With all that being said, you'll find me at code camps, conferences and user groups presenting on .NET, Ruby or both, writing about .NET and Ruby and I will likely be blogging on both in the future.  I know of others that have successfully branched out to other communities and with any luck I'll be successful at it too. On a (sorta) side note, I read a post by Justin Etheredge the other day that pretty much sums up my feelings about Ruby as a language.  I highly recommend checking it out: What Is So Great About Ruby?

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• Day 1 - Finding Like Minds

  - by dapostolov

  So, is being a Game Developer any different from being an IT Developer? I picture a poorly lit environment where I get to purchase my own desk lamp; I'm thinking one of those huge lava lamps that pump out so much heat you could fry an egg on it. To my right: a "great wall" of empty coke cans dwarf me. Eating my last slice of pizza I look across my desk to see a fellow developer with a smug look on his face;  he's just coded his latest module for the game and it looks like he's in nirvana. My duty, of course, is to remind him to keep focused on the job at hand. So, picking up my trusty elastic and aerodynamically crafted paper bullet I begin a 10 minute war of welts and laughter which is promptly abrupted by our Project Manager demanding more details from our morning Scrum meeting. After providing about 5 minutes of geek speak and several words of comfort to make his eyes glaze over...it hits me, the idea for the module...beckoning my developer friend over, we quickly shoo the Project Manager away and begin our brainstorming frenzy ... now, where'd I put that full can of coke? OK. OK. This isn't probably the most ideal game developer environment, but it definitely sounds fun to me...and from what I gather is nothing like most game development companies. But I'm not doing this blog series to "go pro"; like I stated in my first post I want to make a 2D game from an idea my best friend and I drummed up long, long ago. I'm in this for the passion AND I want to see how easy it is for us .Net Developers to create a game. So where do I start? Where can I find like minded individuals? What technologies are there? What do I need to make a video game? The questions are endless....AND...since I already have an idea ... lets start with ... Technology (yes, I'm a geek, live with it...) Technology OK. Predominantly, games are still made in C++ or even C. I'm not sure how much assembly code is floating around lately, however, that is not my concern. I do know C / C++ from my past, enough to even get me by, but I'm mainly interested in a recent, not-so-new, technology called XNA. What is XNA? XNA allows us .Net Developers to make 2D / 3D games for windows, Xbox*, and Windows Mobile 7*. * = for a nominal fee *cough* The following link is your one stop shop to XNA game development: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted The above site hosts information such as: - getting started - a sample/instructional shooter game in 2D / 3D with code (if I'm taking too long for you in this blog series) - downloads - starter kits... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/starterkits/ And of course...forums. You can also subscribe and pay for their premium membership which gets you some pretty awesome tutorials, resources, downloads, and premium community support. Some general Wiki information about XNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_%28Microsoft%29 Community Support OK. Let's move on to industry and community support. Apart from XNA, there are some really cool sites out there, I just haven't found all of them yet. However, I found a really cool Game Development website called Gamastura. You can click on the following link to get you there: http://www.gamasutra.com/ The site is 100% dedicated to "The Art & Business of Making Games". Armed with blogs, twitter, jobs/resumes and most importantly industry news; one could subscribe to the feed and got lost in the wealth of information it provides. On a side note: I remember Gamasutra being around when my best friend and I wanted to make a video game...meaning, they've been around for a while now. I think the most beneficial aspect of this site is to understand the industry you want to get into. Otherwise, it's just a cool site to keep up to date with the industry in general. Another Community Support option is LinkedIn. Amongst the land of extremely bloated achievements and responsibilities lay 3 groups (that I have found) that deal with game development.: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59205 - Game Developers http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=824817 - DirectX Game Developer Network http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=756587 - DirectX Developers The Game Developers group in LinkedIn is by far the most active of the three and could possibly provide a wealth of support. What I've done thus far: - I lightly researched the XNA technology - I looked around for some community sites to assist me - I downloaded the XNA Game Studio 3.1 on my PC and installed it on my IDE - I even tried both tutorials! http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bgintro/chapter1   Best Regards D.

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• SQL Table stored as a Heap - the dangers within

  - by MikeD

  Nearly all of the time I create a table, I include a primary key, and often that PK is implemented as a clustered index. Those two don't always have to go together, but in my world they almost always do. On a recent project, I was working on a data warehouse and a set of SSIS packages to import data from an OLTP database into my data warehouse. The data I was importing from the business database into the warehouse was mostly new rows, sometimes updates to existing rows, and sometimes deletes. I decided to use the MERGE statement to implement the insert, update or delete in the data warehouse, I found it quite performant to have a stored procedure that extracted all the new, updated, and deleted rows from the source database and dump it into a working table in my data warehouse, then run a stored proc in the warehouse that was the MERGE statement that took the rows from the working table and updated the real fact table. Use Warehouse CREATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy (PolicyId int, PolicyTypeKey int, Premium money, Deductible money, EffectiveDate date, Operation varchar(5)) CREATE TABLE fact.Policy (PolicyKey int identity primary key, PolicyId int, PolicyTypeKey int, Premium money, Deductible money, EffectiveDate date) CREATE PROC Integration.MergePolicy as begin begin tran Merge fact.Policy as tgtUsing Integration.MergePolicy as SrcOn (tgt.PolicyId = Src.PolicyId) When not matched by Target then Insert (PolicyId, PolicyTypeKey, Premium, Deductible, EffectiveDate)values (src.PolicyId, src.PolicyTypeKey, src.Premium, src.Deductible, src.EffectiveDate) When matched and src.Operation = 'U' then Update set PolicyTypeKey = src.PolicyTypeKey,Premium = src.Premium,Deductible = src.Deductible,EffectiveDate = src.EffectiveDate When matched and src.Operation = 'D' then Delete ;delete from Integration.WorkPolicy commit end Notice that my worktable (Integration.MergePolicy) doesn't have any primary key or clustered index. I didn't think this would be a problem, since it was relatively small table and was empty after each time I ran the stored proc. For one of the work tables, during the initial loads of the warehouse, it was getting about 1.5 million rows inserted, processed, then deleted. Also, because of a bug in the extraction process, the same 1.5 million rows (plus a few hundred more each time) was getting inserted, processed, and deleted. This was being sone on a fairly hefty server that was otherwise unused, and no one was paying any attention to the time it was taking. This week I received a backup of this database and loaded it on my laptop to troubleshoot the problem, and of course it took a good ten minutes or more to run the process. However, what seemed strange to me was that after I fixed the problem and happened to run the merge sproc when the work table was completely empty, it still took almost ten minutes to complete. I immediately looked back at the MERGE statement to see if I had some sort of outer join that meant it would be scanning the target table (which had about 2 million rows in it), then turned on the execution plan output to see what was happening under the hood. Running the stored procedure again took a long time, and the plan output didn't show me much - 55% on the MERGE statement, and 45% on the DELETE statement, and table scans on the work table in both places. I was surprised at the relative cost of the DELETE statement, because there were really 0 rows to delete, but I was expecting to see the table scans. (I was beginning now to suspect that my problem was because the work table was being stored as a heap.) Then I turned on STATS_IO and ran the sproc again. The output was quite interesting.Table 'Worktable'. Scan count 0, logical reads 0, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.Table 'Policy'. Scan count 0, logical reads 0, physical reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0.Table 'MergePolicy'. Scan count 1, logical reads 433276, physical reads 60, read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0. I've reproduced the above from memory, the details aren't exact, but the essential bit was the very high number of logical reads on the table stored as a heap. Even just doing a SELECT Count(*) from Integration.MergePolicy incurred that sort of output, even though the result was always 0. I suppose I should research more on the allocation and deallocation of pages to tables stored as a heap, but I haven't, and my original assumption that a table stored as a heap with no rows would only need to read one page to answer any query was definitely proven wrong. It's likely that some sort of physical defragmentation of the table may have cleaned that up, but it seemed that the easiest answer was to put a clustered index on the table. After doing so, the execution plan showed a cluster index scan, and the IO stats showed only a single page read. (I aborted my first attempt at adding a clustered index on the table because it was taking too long - instead I ran TRUNCATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy first and added the clustered index, both of which took very little time). I suspect I may not have noticed this if I had used TRUNCATE TABLE Integration.MergePolicy instead of DELETE FROM Integration.MergePolicy, since I'm guessing that the truncate operation does some rather quick releasing of pages allocated to the heap table. In the future, I will likely be much more careful to have a clustered index on every table I use, even the working tables. Mike  

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• MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.3 Beta 2 has been released

  - by fernando

  MySQL Connector/Net 6.6.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is the second of two beta releases intended to introduce users to the new features in the release. This release is feature complete it should be stable enough for users to understand the new features and how we expect them to work.  As is the case with all non-GA releases, it should not be used in any production environment.  It is appropriate for use with MySQL server versions 5.0-5.6. It is now available in source and binary form from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/#downloads and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point-if you can't find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) The 6.6 version of MySQL Connector/Net brings the following new features:   * Stored routine debugging   * Entity Framework 4.3 Code First support   * Pluggable authentication (now third parties can plug new authentications mechanisms into the driver).   * Full Visual Studio 2012 support: everything from Server Explorer to Intellisense&   the Stored Routine debugger. Stored Procedure Debugging ------------------------------------------- We are very excited to introduce stored procedure debugging into our Visual Studio integration.  It works in a very intuitive manner by simply clicking 'Debug Routine' from Server Explorer. You can debug stored routines, functions&   triggers. These release contains fixes specific of the debugger as well as other fixes specific of other areas of Connector/NET:   * Added feature to define initial values for InOut stored procedure arguments.   * Debugger: Fixed Visual Studio locked connection after debugging a routine.   * Fix for bug Cannot Create an Entity with a Key of Type String (MySQL bug #65289, Oracle bug #14540202).   * Fix for bug "CacheServerProperties can cause 'Packet too large' error". MySQL Bug #66578 Orabug #14593547.   * Fix for handling unnamed parameter in MySQLCommand. This fix allows the mysqlcommand to handle parameters without requiring naming (e.g. INSERT INTO Test (id,name) VALUES (?, ?) ) (MySQL Bug #66060, Oracle bug #14499549).   * Fixed end of line issue when debugging a routine.   * Added validation to avoid overwriting a routine backup file when it hasn't changed.   * Fixed inheritance on Entity Framework Code First scenarios. (MySql bug #63920 and Oracle bug #13582335).   * Fixed "Trying to customize column precision in Code First does not work" (MySql bug #65001, Oracle bug #14469048).   * Fixed bug ASP.NET Membership database fails on MySql database UTF32 (MySQL bug #65144, Oracle bug #14495292).   * Fix for MySqlCommand.LastInsertedId holding only 32 bit values (MySql bug #65452, Oracle bug #14171960).   * Fixed "Decimal type should have digits at right of decimal point", now default is 2, and user's changes in     EDM designer are recognized (MySql bug #65127, Oracle bug #14474342).   * Fix for NullReferenceException when saving an uninitialized row in Entity Framework (MySql bug #66066, Oracle bug #14479715).   * Fix for error when calling RoleProvider.RemoveUserFromRole(): causes an exception due to a wrong table being used (MySql bug #65805, Oracle bug #14405338).   * Fix for "Memory Leak on MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlCommand", too many MemoryStream's instances created (MySql bug #65696, Oracle bug #14468204).   * Added ANTLR attribution notice (Oracle bug #14379162).   * Fix for debugger failing when having a routine with an if-elseif-else.   * Also the programming interface for authentication plugins has been redefined. Some limitations remains, due to the current debugger architecture:   * Some MySQL functions cannot be debugged currently (get_lock, release_lock, begin, commit, rollback, set transaction level)..   * Only one debug session may be active on a given server. The Debugger is feature complete at this point. We look forward to your feedback. Documentation ------------------------------------- You can view current Connector/Net documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connector-net.html You can find our team blog at http://blogs.oracle.com/MySQLOnWindows. You can also post questions on our forums at http://forums.mysql.com/. Enjoy and thanks for the support!

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• Process Centric Banking: Loan Origination Solution

  - by Manish Palaparthy

  There is an old proverb that goes, "The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory". So, we keep doing numerous "Proof of Concepts" with our own products on various business cases to analyze them deeply, understand and explain to our customers. We then present our learnings as they happened. The awareness of each PoC should help readers increase the trustworthiness of the results coming out of these PoCs. I present one such PoC where we invested a lot of time&effort.  Process Centric Banking : Loan Origination Solution Loan Origination is a process by which a borrower applies for a new loan and the lender processes that application. Loan origination includes the series of steps taken by the bank from the point the customer shows interest in a loan product all the way to disbursal of funds. The Loan Origination process is relevant for many kind of lenders in Financial services: Banks, Credit Unions, NBFCs(Non Banking Financial Companies) and so on. For simplicity sake, I will use "Bank" as the lending institution in the rest of my article.  Loan Origination is one of the core processes for Banks as it is the process by which the it creates assets against which the Institution earns most of its profits from. A well tuned loan origination process can affect the Bank in many positive ways. Banks have always shown great interest in automating the loan origination process for the above reason. However, due the constant changes in customer environment, market dynamics, prevailing economic conditions, cost pressures & regulatory environment they run into lot of challenges. Let me categorize some of these challenges for you Customer Environment Multiple Channels: Customer can use any of the available channels (Internet Banking, Email, Fax, Branch, Phone Banking, ATM, Broker, Mobile, Snail Mail) to perform all or some of the activities related to her Visibility into the origination process: Expect immediate update on the status of loan processing & alert messages Reduced Turn Around Time: Expect loans to be processed with least turn around time Reduced loan processing fees: Partly due to market dynamics the customer expects the loan processing fee to be negligible Market Dynamics Competitive environment:  The competition keeps creating many variants of loan products to attract customers, the bank needs to create similar product variants with better offers to attract customers or keep existing ones Ability to migrate loans from one vendor to another: It has become really easy for retail customers to move from one bank to the other given the low fee of loan processing and highly attractive offers. How does the bank protect it's customer base while actively engaging with potential customers banking with competitor banks Flexibility to react to market developments: Market development greatly influence loan processing, underwriting, asset valuation, risk mitigation rules. Can the bank modify rules and policies, the idea is not just to react to market developments but to pro-actively manage new developments Economic conditions Constant change in various rates and their implications on the rates and rules applied when on-boarding a loan: How quickly can the bank apply changes to rates offered to customers when the central bank changes various rates Requirements of Audit by the central banker: Tough economic conditions have demanded much more stringent audit rules and tests. The banks needs to produce ready reports(historic & operational) for audit compliance Risk Mitigation: While risk mitigation has always been a key concern for the bank, this is the area where the bank's underwriters & risk analysts spend the maximum time when processing a loan application. In order to reduce TAT the bank cannot compromise on its risk mitigation strategies Cost pressures Reduce Cost of processing per application: To deliver a reduced loan processing fee to the customer, the bank needs to keep its cost per processing loan application low. Meet customer TAT expectations while reducing the queues and the systems being used to process the loan application: The loan application could potentially be spending a lot of time waiting in the queue for further processing. Different volumes & patterns of applications demand different queuing algorithms. The bank needs to have real-time visibility into these queues and have the flexibility to change queuing algorithms at runtime  Increase the use of electronic communication and reduce the branch channel usage: Lesser automation leads not only leads to Increased turn around time, it also impacts more costs to reach out to customers The objective of our PoC was to implement a Loan Origination Solution whose ownership lies with the bank and effectively meet the challenges listed above. We built a simple story board for the solution We then went about implementing our storyboard using Oracle BPM Suite, Webcenter Content : Imaging. The web UI has been built on ADF technolgies, while the integration with core-services has been implemented using the underlying SOA infrastructure. The BPM process model is quite exhaustive can meet all the challenges listed above to reasonable degree. A bank intending to implement an end-to-end Loan Origination Solution has multiple options at it's disposal. It can Develop a customer Loan Origination Application from scratch: Gives maximum opportunity to build what you want but inflexible to upgrade and maintain. Higher TCO in long term Buy a Packaged application & customize it: Customizing a generic loan application can be tedious and prove as difficult as above. Build it using many disparate & un-integrated tools: Initially seems easier than developing from scratch. But, without integrated tool sets this is not a viable approach either or A solution based on a Framework: Independent Services and Business Process Modeling provide decoupled architecture that is flexible. We built this framework end-to-end with processes the core process of loan origination & several sub-processes such as Analyse and define customer needs, customer credit verification, identity check processes, legal review process, New customer registration & risk assessment.

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• Using Transaction Logging to Recover Post-Archived Essbase data

  - by Keith Rosenthal

  Data recovery is typically performed by restoring data from an archive.  Data added or removed since the last archive took place can also be recovered by enabling transaction logging in Essbase.  Transaction logging works by writing transactions to a log store.  The information in the log store can then be recovered by replaying the log store entries in sequence since the last archive took place.  The following information is recorded within a transaction log entry: Sequence ID Username Start Time End Time Request Type A request type can be one of the following categories: Calculations, including the default calculation as well as both server and client side calculations Data loads, including data imports as well as data loaded using a load rule Data clears as well as outline resets Locking and sending data from SmartView and the Spreadsheet Add-In.  Changes from Planning web forms are also tracked since a lock and send operation occurs during this process. You can use the Display Transactions command in the EAS console or the query database MAXL command to view the transaction log entries. Enabling Transaction Logging Transaction logging can be enabled at the Essbase server, application or database level by adding the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION essbase.cfg setting.  The following is the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION syntax: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION [appname [dbname]] LOGLOCATION NATIVE ENABLE | DISABLE Note that you can have multiple TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION entries in the essbase.cfg file.  For example: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Hyperion/trlog NATIVE ENABLE TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Hyperion/trlog NATIVE DISABLE The first statement will enable transaction logging for all Essbase applications, and the second statement will disable transaction logging for the Sample application.  As a result, transaction logging will be enabled for all applications except the Sample application. A location on a physical disk other than the disk where ARBORPATH or the disk files reside is recommended to optimize overall Essbase performance. Configuring Transaction Log Replay Although transaction log entries are stored based on the LOGLOCATION parameter of the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION essbase.cfg setting, copies of data load and rules files are stored in the ARBORPATH/app/appname/dbname/Replay directory to optimize the performance of replaying logged transactions.  The default is to archive client data loads, but this configuration setting can be used to archive server data loads (including SQL server data loads) or both client and server data loads. To change the type of data to be archived, add the TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE configuration setting to the essbase.cfg file.  Note that you can have multiple TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE entries in the essbase.cfg file to adjust settings for individual applications and databases. Replaying the Transaction Log and Transaction Log Security Considerations To replay the transactions, use either the Replay Transactions command in the EAS console or the alter database MAXL command using the replay transactions grammar.  Transactions can be replayed either after a specified log time or using a range of transaction sequence IDs. The default when replaying transactions is to use the security settings of the user who originally performed the transaction.  However, if that user no longer exists or that user's username was changed, the replay operation will fail. Instead of using the default security setting, add the REPLAYSECURITYOPTION essbase.cfg setting to use the security settings of the administrator who performs the replay operation.  REPLAYSECURITYOPTION 2 will explicitly use the security settings of the administrator performing the replay operation.  REPLAYSECURITYOPTION 3 will use the administrator security settings if the original user’s security settings cannot be used. Removing Transaction Logs and Archived Replay Data Load and Rules Files Transaction logs and archived replay data load and rules files are not automatically removed and are only removed manually.  Since these files can consume a considerable amount of space, the files should be removed on a periodic basis. The transaction logs should be removed one database at a time instead of all databases simultaneously.  The data load and rules files associated with the replayed transactions should be removed in chronological order from earliest to latest.  In addition, do not remove any data load and rules files with a timestamp later than the timestamp of the most recent archive file. Partitioned Database Considerations For partitioned databases, partition commands such as synchronization commands cannot be replayed.  When recovering data, the partition changes must be replayed manually and logged transactions must be replayed in the correct chronological order. If the partitioned database includes any @XREF commands in the calc script, the logged transactions must be selectively replayed in the correct chronological order between the source and target databases. References For additional information, please see the Oracle EPM System Backup and Recovery Guide.  For EPM 11.1.2.2, the link is http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17236_01/epm.1112/epm_backup_recovery_1112200.pdf

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• [Windows 8] An application bar toggle button

  - by Benjamin Roux

  To stay in the application bar stuff, here’s another useful control which enable to create an application bar button that can be toggled between two different contents/styles/commands (used to create a favorite/unfavorite or a play/pause button for example). namespace Indeed.Controls { public class AppBarToggleButton : Button { public bool IsChecked { get { return (bool)GetValue(IsCheckedProperty); } set { SetValue(IsCheckedProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty IsCheckedProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("IsChecked", typeof(bool), typeof(AppBarToggleButton), new PropertyMetadata(false, (o, e) => (o as AppBarToggleButton).IsCheckedChanged())); public string CheckedContent { get { return (string)GetValue(CheckedContentProperty); } set { SetValue(CheckedContentProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty CheckedContentProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("CheckedContent", typeof(string), typeof(AppBarToggleButton), null); public ICommand CheckedCommand { get { return (ICommand)GetValue(CheckedCommandProperty); } set { SetValue(CheckedCommandProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty CheckedCommandProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("CheckedCommand", typeof(ICommand), typeof(AppBarToggleButton), null); public Style CheckedStyle { get { return (Style)GetValue(CheckedStyleProperty); } set { SetValue(CheckedStyleProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty CheckedStyleProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("CheckedStyle", typeof(Style), typeof(AppBarToggleButton), null); public bool AutoToggle { get { return (bool)GetValue(AutoToggleProperty); } set { SetValue(AutoToggleProperty, value); } } public static readonly DependencyProperty AutoToggleProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("AutoToggle", typeof(bool), typeof(AppBarToggleButton), null); private object content; private ICommand command; private Style style; private void IsCheckedChanged() { if (IsChecked) { // backup the current content and command content = Content; command = Command; style = Style; if (CheckedStyle == null) Content = CheckedContent; else Style = CheckedStyle; Command = CheckedCommand; } else { if (CheckedStyle == null) Content = content; else Style = style; Command = command; } } protected override void OnTapped(Windows.UI.Xaml.Input.TappedRoutedEventArgs e) { base.OnTapped(e); if (AutoToggle) IsChecked = !IsChecked; } } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } To use it, it’s very simple. <ic:AppBarToggleButton Style="{StaticResource PlayAppBarButtonStyle}" CheckedStyle="{StaticResource PauseAppBarButtonStyle}" Command="{Binding Path=PlayCommand}" CheckedCommand="{Binding Path=PauseCommand}" IsChecked="{Binding Path=IsPlaying}" /> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } When the IsPlaying property (in my ViewModel) is true the button becomes a Pause button, when it’s false it becomes a Play button. Warning: Just make sure that the IsChecked property is set in last in your control !! If you don’t use style you can alternatively use Content and CheckedContent. Furthermore you can set the AutoToggle to true if you don’t want to control is IsChecked property through binding. With this control and the AppBarPopupButton, you can now create awesome application bar for your apps ! Stay tuned for more awesome Windows 8 tricks !

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• Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 15 &ndash; Network Management

  - by MarkPearl

  After reading this section you should be able to Understand network management and the importance of documentation, baseline measurements, policies, and regulations to assess and maintain a network’s health. Manage a network’s performance using SNMP-based network management software, system and event logs, and traffic-shaping techniques Identify the reasons for and elements of an asset managements system Plan and follow regular hardware and software maintenance routines Fundamentals of Network Management Network management refers to the assessment, monitoring, and maintenance of all aspects of a network including checking for hardware faults, ensuring high QoS, maintaining records of network assets, etc. Scope of network management differs depending on the size and requirements of the network. All sub topics of network management share the goals of enhancing the efficiency and performance while preventing costly downtime or loss. Documentation The way documentation is stored may vary, but to adequately manage a network one should at least record the following… Physical topology (types of LAN and WAN topologies – ring, star, hybrid) Access method (does it use Ethernet 802.3, token ring, etc.) Protocols Devices (Switches, routers, etc) Operating Systems Applications Configurations (What version of operating system and config files for serve / client software) Baseline Measurements A baseline is a report of the network’s current state of operation. Baseline measurements might include the utilization rate for your network backbone, number of users logged on per day, etc. Baseline measurements allow you to compare future performance increases or decreases caused by network changes or events with past network performance. Obtaining baseline measurements is the only way to know for certain whether a pattern of usage has changed, or whether a network upgrade has made a difference. There are various tools available for measuring baseline performance on a network. Policies, Procedures, and Regulations Following rules helps limit chaos, confusion, and possibly downtime. The following policies and procedures and regulations make for sound network management. Media installations and management (includes designing physical layout of cable, etc.) Network addressing policies (includes choosing and applying a an addressing scheme) Resource sharing and naming conventions (includes rules for logon ID’s) Security related policies Troubleshooting procedures Backup and disaster recovery procedures In addition to internal policies, a network manager must consider external regulatory rules. Fault and Performance Management After documenting every aspect of your network and following policies and best practices, you are ready to asses you networks status on an on going basis. This process includes both performance management and fault management. Network Management Software To accomplish both fault and performance management, organizations often use enterprise-wide network management software. There various software packages that do this, each collect data from multiple networked devices at regular intervals, in a process called polling. Each managed device runs a network management agent. So as not to affect the performance of a device while collecting information, agents do not demand significant processing resources. The definition of a managed devices and their data are collected in a MIB (Management Information Base). Agents communicate information about managed devices via any of several application layer protocols. On modern networks most agents use SNMP which is part of the TCP/IP suite and typically runs over UDP on port 161. Because of the flexibility and sophisticated network management applications are a challenge to configure and fine-tune. One needs to be careful to only collect relevant information and not cause performance issues (i.e. pinging a device every 5 seconds can be a problem with thousands of devices). MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a simple command line utility that uses SNMP to poll devices and collects data in a log file. MRTG can be used with Windows, UNIX and Linux. System and Event Logs Virtually every condition recognized by an operating system can be recorded. This is typically done using event logs. In Windows there is a GUI event log viewer. Similar information is recorded in UNIX and Linux in a system log. Much of the information collected in event logs and syslog files does not point to a problem, even if it is marked with a warning so it is important to filter your logs appropriately to reduce the noise. Traffic Shaping When a network must handle high volumes of network traffic, users benefit from performance management technique called traffic shaping. Traffic shaping involves manipulating certain characteristics of packets, data streams, or connections to manage the type and amount of traffic traversing a network or interface at any moment. Its goals are to assure timely delivery of the most important traffic while offering the best possible performance for all users. Several types of traffic prioritization exist including prioritizing traffic according to any of the following characteristics… Protocol IP address User group DiffServr VLAN tag in a Data Link layer frame Service or application Caching In addition to traffic shaping, a network or host might use caching to improve performance. Caching is the local storage of frequently needed files that would otherwise be obtained from an external source. By keeping files close to the requester, caching allows the user to access those files quickly. The most common type of caching is Web caching, in which Web pages are stored locally. To an ISP, caching is much more than just convenience. It prevents a significant volume of WAN traffic, thus improving performance and saving money. Asset Management Another key component in managing networks is identifying and tracking its hardware. This is called asset management. The first step to asset management is to take an inventory of each node on the network. You will also want to keep records of every piece of software purchased by your organization. Asset management simplifies maintaining and upgrading the network chiefly because you know what the system includes. In addition, asset management provides network administrators with information about the costs and benefits of certain types of hardware or software. Change Management Networks are always in a stage of flux with various aspects including… Software changes and patches Client Upgrades Shared Application Upgrades NOS Upgrades Hardware and Physical Plant Changes Cabling Upgrades Backbone Upgrades For a detailed explanation on each of these read the textbook (Page 750 – 761)

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• Disaster Recovery Discovery

  - by Rodney Landrum

  Last weekend I joined several of my IT staff on a mission to perform a DR test in our remote CoLo center in a large South East city of the US. Can I be more obtuse? The goal was simple for me as the sole DBA in a throng of Windows, Storage, Network and SAN admins – restore the databases and make them work. There were 4 applications that back ended to 7 SQL Server databases on 4 different SQL Server instances. We would maintain the original server names, but beyond that it was fair game. We had time to prepare so I was able to script out or otherwise automate the recovery process. I used sp_help_revlogin for three of the servers, a bit of a cheat actually because restoring the Master database on the target DR servers was the specified course of action according to the DR procedures ( the caveat “IF REQUIRED” left it open to interpretation. I really wanted to avoid the step of restoring Master for a number of reasons but mainly because I did not want to deal with issues starting SQL Services afterward. Having to account for the location of TempDB and the version conflicts of the resource DBs were just two of the battles I chose not to fight. Not to mention other system database location problems that might arise and prevent SQL from starting.  I was going to have to restore all of the user databases anyway, so I would not really gain any benefit, outside of logins, for taking the time to restore the source Master database over the newly installed one on the fresh server. What I wanted was the ability to restore the Master database as a user database, call it Master_Mine, from a backup on the source system and then use that restored database to script the SQL Logins and passwords on the DR systems. While I did not attempt this on the trip, the thought stuck in my mind and this past week I succeeded at scripting user accounts and passwords using only a restored copy of the Master database. Granted there were several challenges to overcome.  Also, as is usual for any work like this the usual disclaimers apply:  This is not something that I would imagine Microsoft would condone or support and this was really only an experiment for me to learn if it was even possible. While I have tested the process with success, I do not know that I would use this technique in a documented procedure because future updates for SQL Server will render this technique non-functional. I thought at first, incorrectly of course, that I could use sp_help_revlogin on a restored copy of the master database I named Master_Mine.   Since sp_help_revlogin uses system schema objects, sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals, this was not going to work because all results would come from the main Master database. To test this I added a SQL login via SSMS, backed up Master, restored  it as Master_Mine, and then deleted the login.  Even though the test account I created should presumably still be in the Master_Mine database, I should be able to get to it and script out its creation with its password hash so that I would not need to know the password, but any applications that stored that password would not have to be altered in the DR scenario. They would just work as expected. Once I realized that would not work I began looking deeper.  Knowing that sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals are system views, their underlying code should be available with sp_helptext, right? They were. And this led me to discover the two tables sys.sysxlgns and sys.sysprivs, where the data I needed was stored. These tables existed in both the real Master and the restored copy, Master_Mine.  I used this information to tweak the sp_help_revlogin stored procedure to use these tables instead to create the logins cursor used in sp_help_revlogin. For the password hash,  sp_help_revlogin uses the function LoginProperty() which takes a user name and option ‘passwordhash’ to return the hash for the user. Unfortunately, it requires the login to exist in the Master database. This would not work. So another slight modification I had to make was to pull the password hash itself (pwdhash from sys.sysxlgns) into the logins cursor and comment out the section of sp_help_revlogin that uses LoginProperty. Instead, I pass the pwdhash value as the variable @PWD_varbinary to the sp_hexadecimal stored procedure which is also created by and used within the code provided by Microsoft in the link above for sp_help_revlogin. The final challenge: sys.sysxlgns and sys.server_principals are visible only within a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) query window in SSMS or within SQLCDMD.  To open a DAC connection you have to be logged in on the SQL Server itself, via RDP in my case,  and you preface the server name in the query connection with ADMIN:, so that the server connection looks like ADMIN:ServerName. From there you can create the modified stored procedure in the restored copy of a Master database from a source system as whatever name you like, and then run the modified stored procedure. I named my new stored procedure usp_help_revlogin_MyMaster. Upon execution I was happy to see the logins and password hashes that I needed to apply from the source Master database without having to restore over the new Master system database and without the need to access the original server (assuming it was down due to whatever disaster put it in that state). You will note that I am not providing full code samples here of the modifications. I will say that it was a slight bit of work and anyone who needed to do this for whatever reason, could fairly easily roll their own solution with the information provided herein.  My goal, as I said was to prove that this could be done and provide another option if required to ease the burden of getting SQL Servers up and available in an emergency situation where alternatives may be more challenging or otherwise unavailable.  

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #004

  - by pinaldave

  Here is the list of curetted articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2006 Auto Generate Script to Delete Deprecated Fields in Current Database In early career everytime I have to drop a column, I had hard time doing it because I was scared what if that column was needed somewhere in the code. Due to this fear I never dropped any column. I just renamed the column. If the column which I renamed was needed afterwards it was very easy to rename it back again. However, it is not recommended to keep the deleted column renamed in the database. At every interval I used to drop the columns which was prefixed with specific word. This script is 6 years old but still works. Give it a look, I am open for improvements. 2007 Shrinking Truncate Log File – Log Full – Part 2 Shrinking database or mdf file is indeed bad thing and it creates lots of problems. However, once in a while there is legit requirement to shrink the log file – a very rare one. In the rare occasion shrinking or truncating the log file may be the only solution. However, one should make sure to take backup before and after the truncate or shrink as in case of a disaster they can be very useful. Remember that truncating log file will break the log chain and while restore it can create major issue. Anyway, use this feature with caution. 2008 Simple Use of Cursor to Print All Stored Procedures of Database Including Schema This is a very interesting requirement I used to face in my early career days, I needed to print all the Stored procedures of my database. Interesting enough I had written a cursor to do so. Today when I look back at this stored procedure, I believe there will be a much cleaner way to do the same task, however, I still use this SP quite often when I have to document all the stored procedures of my database. Interesting Observation about Order of Resultset without ORDER BY In industry many developers avoid using ORDER BY clause to display the result in particular order thinking that Index is enforcing the order. In this interesting example, I demonstrate that without using ORDER BY, same table and similar query can return different results. Query optimizer always returns results using any method which is optimized for performance. The learning is There is no order unless ORDER BY is used. 2009 Size of Index Table – A Puzzle to Find Index Size for Each Index on Table I asked this puzzle earlier where I asked how to find the Index size for each of the tables. The puzzle was very well received and lots of interesting answers were received. To answer this question I have written following blog posts. I suggest this weekend you try to solve this problem and see if you can come up with a better solution. If not, well here are the solutions. Solution 1 | Solution 2 | Solution 3 Understanding Table Hints with Examples Hints are options and strong suggestions specified for enforcement by the SQL Server query processor on DML statements. The hints override any execution plan the query optimizer might select for a query. The SQL Server Query optimizer is a very smart tool and it makes a better selection of execution plan. Suggesting hints to the Query Optimizer should be attempted when absolutely necessary and by experienced developers who know exactly what they are doing (or in development as a way to experiment and learn). Interesting Observation – TOP 100 PERCENT and ORDER BY I have seen developers and DBAs using TOP very causally when they have to use the ORDER BY clause. Theoretically, there is no need of ORDER BY in the view at all. All the ordering should be done outside the view and view should just have the SELECT statement in it. It was quite common that to save this extra typing by including ordering inside of the view. At several instances developers want a complete resultset and for the same they include TOP 100 PERCENT along with ORDER BY, assuming that this will simulate the SELECT statement with ORDER BY. 2010 SQLPASS Nov 8-11, 2010-Seattle – An Alternative Look at Experience In year 2010 I attended most prestigious SQL Server event SQLPASS between Nov 8-11, 2010 at Seattle. I have only one expression for the event - Best Summit Ever. Instead of writing about my usual routine or the event, I wrote about the interesting things I did and how I felt about it! When I go back and read it, I feel that this is the best event I attended in year 2010. Change Database Access to Single User Mode Using SSMS Image says all. 2011 SQL Server 2012 has introduced new analytic functions. These functions were long awaited and I am glad that they are now here. Before when any of this function was needed, people used to write long T-SQL code to simulate these functions. But now there’s no need of doing so. Having available native function also helps performance as well readability. Function SQLAuthority MSDN CUME_DIST CUME_DIST CUME_DIST FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE FIRST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LAST_VALUE LEAD LEAD LEAD LAG LAG LAG PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_CONT PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENTILE_DISC PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK PERCENT_RANK Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Part 1 - Load Testing In The Cloud

  - by Tarun Arora

  Azure is fascinating, but even more fascinating is the marriage of Azure and TFS! Introduction Recently a client I worked for had 2 major business critical applications being delivered, with very little time budgeted for Performance testing, we immediately hit a bottleneck when the performance testing phase started, the in house infrastructure team could not support the hardware requirements in the short notice. It was suggested that the performance testing be performed on one of the QA environments which was a fraction of the production environment. This didn’t seem right, the team decided to turn to the cloud. The team took advantage of the elasticity offered by Azure, starting with a single test agent which was provisioned and ready for use with in 30 minutes the team scaled up to 17 test agents to perform a very comprehensive performance testing cycle. Issues were identified and resolved but the highlight was that the cost of running the ‘test rig’ proved to be less than if hosted on premise by the infrastructure team. Thank you for taking the time out to read this blog post, in the series of posts, I’ll try and cover the start to end of everything you need to know to use Azure to build your Test Rig in the cloud. But Why Azure? I have my own Data Centre… If the environment is provisioned in your own datacentre, - No matter what level of service agreement you may have with your infrastructure team there will be down time when the environment is patched - How fast can you scale up or down the environments (keeping the enterprise processes in mind) Administration, Cost, Flexibility and Scalability are the areas you would want to think around when taking the decision between your own Data Centre and Azure! How is Microsoft's Public Cloud Offering different from Amazon’s Public Cloud Offering? Microsoft's offering of the Cloud is a hybrid of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which distinguishes Microsoft's offering from other providers such as Amazon (Amazon only offers IaaS). PaaS – Platform as a Service IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service Fills the needs of those who want to build and run custom applications as services. Similar to traditional hosting, where a business will use the hosted environment as a logical extension of the on-premises datacentre. A service provider offers a pre-configured, virtualized application server environment to which applications can be deployed by the development staff. Since the service providers manage the hardware (patching, upgrades and so forth), as well as application server uptime, the involvement of IT pros is minimized. On-demand scalability combined with hardware and application server management relieves developers from infrastructure concerns and allows them to focus on building applications. The servers (physical and virtual) are rented on an as-needed basis, and the IT professionals who manage the infrastructure have full control of the software configuration. This kind of flexibility increases the complexity of the IT environment, as customer IT professionals need to maintain the servers as though they are on-premises. The maintenance activities may include patching and upgrades of the OS and the application server, load balancing, failover clustering of database servers, backup and restoration, and any other activities that mitigate the risks of hardware and software failures.   The biggest advantage with PaaS is that you do not have to worry about maintaining the environment, you can focus all your time in solving the business problems with your solution rather than worrying about maintaining the environment. If you decide to use a VM Role on Azure, you are asking for IaaS, more on this later. A nice blog post here on the difference between Saas, PaaS and IaaS. Now that we are convinced why we should be turning to the cloud and why in specific Azure, let’s discuss about the Test Rig. The Load Test Rig – Topology Now the moment of truth, Of course a big part of getting value from cloud computing is identifying the most adequate workloads to take to the cloud, so I’ve decided to try to make a Load Testing rig where the Agents are running on Windows Azure.   I’ll talk you through the above Topology, - User: User kick starts the load test run from the developer workstation on premise. This passes the request to the Test Controller. - Test Controller: The Test Controller is on premise connected to the same domain as the developer workstation. As soon as the Test Controller receives the request it makes use of the Windows Azure Connect service to orchestrate the test responsibilities to all the Test Agents. The Windows Azure Connect endpoint software must be active on all Azure instances and on the Controller machine as well. This allows IP connectivity between them and, given that the firewall is properly configured, allows the Controller to send work loads to the agents. In parallel, the Controller will collect the performance data from the agents, using the traditional WMI mechanisms. - Test Agents: The Test Agents are on the Windows Azure Public Cloud, as soon as the test controller issues instructions to the test agents, the test agents start executing the load tests. The HTTP requests are issued against the web server on premise, the results are captured by the test agents. And finally the results are passed over to the controller. - Servers: The Web Server and DB Server are hosted on premise in the datacentre, this is usually the case with business critical applications, you probably want to manage them your self. Recap and What’s next? So, in the introduction in the series of blog posts on Load Testing in the cloud I highlighted why creating a test rig in the cloud is a good idea, what advantages does Windows Azure offer and the Test Rig topology that I will be using. I would also like to mention that i stumbled upon this [Video] on Azure in a nutshell, great watch if you are new to Windows Azure. In the next post I intend to start setting up the Load Test Environment and discuss pricing with respect to test agent machine types that will be used in the test rig. Hope you enjoyed this post, If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to add to this blog post. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora.  See you in Part II.   Share this post : CodeProject

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• What to do after a servicing fails on TFS 2010

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  What do you do if you run a couple of hotfixes against your TFS 2010 server and you start to see seem odd behaviour? A customer of mine encountered that very problem, but they could not just, or at least not easily, go back a version.   You see, around the time of the TFS 2010 launch this company decided to upgrade their entire 250+ development team from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010. They encountered a few problems, owing mainly to the size of their TFS deployment, and the way they were using TFS. They were not doing anything wrong, but when you have the largest deployment of TFS outside of Microsoft you tend to run into problems that most people will never encounter. We are talking half a terabyte of source control in TFS with over 80 proxy servers. Its certainly the largest deployment I have ever heard of. When they did their upgrade way back in April, they found two major flaws in the product that meant that they had to back out of the upgrade and wait for a couple of hotfixes. KB983504 – Hotfix KB983578 – Patch KB2401992 -Hotfix In the time since they got the hotfixes they have run 6 successful trial migrations, but we are not talking minutes or hours here. When you have 400+ GB of data it takes time to copy it around. It takes time to do the upgrade and it takes time to do a backup. Well, last week it was crunch time with their developers off for Christmas they had a window of opportunity to complete the upgrade. Now these guys are good, but they wanted Northwest Cadence to be available “just in case”. They did not expect any problems as they already had 6 successful trial upgrades. The problems surfaced around 20 hours in after the first set of hotfixes had been applied. The new Team Project Collection, the only thing of importance, had disappeared from the Team Foundation Server Administration console. The collection would not reattach either. It would not even list the new collection as attachable! Figure: We know there is a database there, but it does not This was a dire situation as 20+ hours to repeat would leave the customer over time with 250+ developers sitting around doing nothing. We tried everything, and then we stumbled upon the command of last resort. TFSConfig Recover /ConfigurationDB:SQLServer\InstanceName;TFS_ConfigurationDBName /CollectionDB:SQLServer\instanceName;"Collection Name" -http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff407077.aspx WARNING: Never run this command! Now this command does something a little nasty. It assumes that there really should not be anything wrong and sets about fixing it. It ignores any servicing levels in the Team Project Collection database and forcibly applies the latest version of the schema. I am sure you can imagine the types of problems this may cause when the schema is updated leaving the data behind. That said, as far as we could see this collection looked good, and we were even able to find and attach the team project collection to the Configuration database. Figure: After attaching the TPC it enters a servicing mode After reattaching the team project collection we found the message “Re-Attaching”. Well, fair enough that sounds like something that may need to happen, and after checking that there was disk IO we left it to it. 14+ hours later, it was still not done so the customer raised a priority support call with MSFT and an engineer helped them out. Figure: Everything looks good, it is just offline. Tip: Did you know that these logs are not represented in the ~/Logs/* folder until they are opened once? The engineer dug around a bit and listened to our situation. He knew that we had run the dreaded “tfsconfig restore”, but was not phased. Figure: This message looks suspiciously like the wrong servicing version As it turns out, the servicing version was slightly out of sync with the schema. KB Schema Successful           KB983504 341 Yes   KB983578 344 sort of   KB2401992 360 nope   Figure: KB, Schema table with notation to its success The Schema version above represents the final end of run version for that hotfix or patch. The only way forward The problem was that the version was somewhere between 341 and 344. This is not a nice place to be in and the engineer give us the  only way forward as the removal of the servicing number from the database so that the re-attach process would apply the latest schema. if his sounds a little like the “tfsconfig recover” command then you are exactly right. Figure: Sneakily changing that 3 to a 1 should do the trick Figure: Changing the status and dropping the version should do it Now that we have done that we should be able to safely reattach and enable the Team Project Collection. Figure: The TPC is now all attached and running You may think that this is the end of the story, but it is not. After a while of mulling and seeking expert advice we came to the opinion that the database was, for want of a better term, “hosed”. There could well be orphaned data in there and the likelihood that we would have problems later down the line is pretty high. We contacted the customer back and made them aware that in all likelihood the repaired database was more like a “cut and shut” than anything else, and at the first sign of trouble later down the line was likely to split in two. So with 40+ hours invested in getting this new database ready the customer threw it away and started again. What would you do? Would you take the “cut and shut” to production and hope for the best?

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 5): Query Snapshots

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've emailed us about a bug you've encountered with the EAP or beta versions of Schema Compare for Oracle, we probably asked you to send us a query snapshot of your databases. Here, I explain what a query snapshot is, and how it helps us fix your bug. Problem 1: Debugging users' bug reports When we started the Schema Compare project, we knew we were going to get problems with users' databases - configurations we hadn't considered, features that weren't installed, unicode issues, wierd dependencies... With SQL Compare, users are generally happy to send us a database backup that we can restore using a single RESTORE DATABASE command on our test servers and immediately reproduce the problem. Oracle, on the other hand, would be a lot more tricky. As Oracle generally has a 1-to-1 mapping between instances and databases, any databases users sent would have to be restored to their own instance. Furthermore, the number of steps required to get a properly working database, and the size of most oracle databases, made it infeasible to ask every customer who came across a bug during our beta program to send us their databases. We also knew that there would be lots of issues with data security that would make it hard to get backups. So we needed an easier way to be able to debug customers issues and sort out what strange schema data Oracle was returning. Problem 2: Test execution time Another issue we knew we would have to solve was the execution time of the tests we would produce for the Schema Compare engine. Our initial prototype showed that querying the data dictionary for schema information was going to be slow (at least 15 seconds per database), and this is generally proportional to the size of the database. If you're running thousands of tests on the same databases, each one registering separate schemas, not only would the tests would take hours and hours to run, but the test servers would be hammered senseless. The solution To solve these, we needed to be able to populate the schema of a database without actually connecting to it. Well, the IDataReader interface is the primary way we read data from an Oracle server. The data dictionary queries we use return their data in terms of simple strings and numbers, which we then process and reconstruct into an object model, and the results of these queries are identical for identical schemas. So, we can record the raw results of the queries once, and then replay these results to construct the same object model as many times as required without needing to actually connect to the original database. This is what query snapshots do. They are binary files containing the raw unprocessed data we get back from the oracle server for all the queries we run on the data dictionary to get schema information. The core of the query snapshot generation takes the results of the IDataReader we get from running queries on Oracle, and passes the row data to a BinaryWriter that writes it straight to a file. The query snapshot can then be replayed to create the same object model; when the results of a specific query is needed by the population code, we can simply read the binary data stored in the file on disk and present it through an IDataReader wrapper. This is far faster than querying the server over the network, and allows us to run tests in a reasonable time. They also allow us to easily debug a customers problem; using a simple snapshot generation program, users can generate a query snapshot that could be sent along with a bug report that we can immediately replay on our machines to let us debug the issue, rather than having to obtain database backups and restore databases to test systems. There are also far fewer problems with data security; query snapshots only contain schema information, which is generally less sensitive than table data. Query snapshots implementation However, actually implementing such a feature did have a couple of 'gotchas' to it. My second blog post detailed the development of the dependencies algorithm we use to ensure we get all the dependencies in the database, and that algorithm uses data from both databases to find all the needed objects - what database you're comparing to affects what objects get populated from both databases. We get information on these additional objects using an appropriate WHERE clause on all the population queries. So, in order to accurately replay the results of querying the live database, the query snapshot needs to be a snapshot of a comparison of two databases, not just populating a single database. Furthermore, although the code population queries (eg querying all_tab_cols to get column information) can simply be passed straight from the IDataReader to the BinaryWriter, we need to hook into and run the live dependencies algorithm while we're creating the snapshot to ensure we get the same WHERE clauses, and the same query results, as if we were populating straight from a live system. We also need to store the results of the dependencies queries themselves, as the resulting dependency graph is stored within the OracleDatabase object that is produced, and is later used to help order actions in synchronization scripts. This is significantly helped by the dependencies algorithm being a deterministic algorithm - given the same input, it will always return the same output. Therefore, when we're replaying a query snapshot, and processing dependency information, we simply have to return the results of the queries in the order we got them from the live database, rather than trying to calculate the contents of all_dependencies on the fly. Query snapshots are a significant feature in Schema Compare that really helps us to debug problems with the tool, as well as making our testers happier. Although not really user-visible, they are very useful to the development team to help us fix bugs in the product much faster than we otherwise would be able to.

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• T-SQL Tuesday #34: Help! I Need Somebody!

  - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)

  Welcome everyone to T-SQL Tuesday Episode 34!  When last we tuned in, Mike Fal (b|t) hosted Trick Shots.  These highlighted techniques or tricks that you figured out on your own which helped you understand SQL Server better. This month, I'm asking you to look back this past week, year, century, or hour...to a time when you COULDN'T figure it out.  When you were stuck on a SQL Server problem and you had to seek help. In the beginning... SQL Server has changed a lot since I started with it.  <Cranky Old Guy> Back in my day, Books Online was neither.  There were no blogs. Google was the third-place search site. There were perhaps two or three community forums where you could ask questions.  (Besides the Microsoft newsgroups...which you had to access with Usenet.  And endure the wrath of...Celko.)  Your "training" was reading a book, made from real dead trees, that you bought from your choice of brick-and-mortar bookstore. And except for your local user groups, there were no conferences, seminars, SQL Saturdays, or any online video hookups where you could interact with a person. You'd have to call Microsoft Support...on the phone...a LANDLINE phone.  And none of this "SQL Family" business!</Cranky Old Guy> Even now, with all these excellent resources available, it's still daunting for a beginner to seek help for SQL Server.  The product is roughly 1247.4523 times larger than it was 15 years ago, and it's simply impossible to know everything about it.*  So whether you are a beginner, or a seasoned pro of over a decade's experience, what do you do when you need help on SQL Server? That's so meta... In the spirit of offering help, here are some suggestions for your topic: Tell us about a person or SQL Server community who have been helpful to you.  It can be about a technical problem, or not, e.g. someone who volunteered for your local SQL Saturday.  Sing their praises!  Let the world know who they are! Do you have any tricks for using Books Online?  Do you use the locally installed product, or are you completely online with BOL/MSDN/Technet, and why? If you've been using SQL Server for over 10 years, how has your help-seeking changed? Are you using Twitter, StackOverflow, MSDN Forums, or another resource that didn't exist when you started? What made you switch? Do you spend more time helping others than seeking help? What motivates you to help, and how do you contribute? Structure your post along the lyrics to The Beatles song Help! Audio or video renditions are particularly welcome! Lyrics must include reference to SQL Server terminology or community, and performances must be in your voice or include you playing an instrument. These are just suggestions, you are free to write whatever you like.  Bonus points if you can incorporate ALL of these into a single post.  (Or you can do multiple posts, we're flexible like that.)  Help us help others by showing how others helped you! Legalese, Your Rights, Yada yada... If you would like to participate in T-SQL Tuesday please be sure to follow the rules below: Your blog post must be published between Tuesday, September 11, 2012 00:00:00 GMT and Wednesday, September 12, 2012 00:00:00 GMT. Include the T-SQL Tuesday logo (above) and hyperlink it back to this post. If you don’t see your post in trackbacks, add the link to the comments below. If you are on Twitter please tweet your blog using the #TSQL2sDay hashtag.  I can be contacted there as @sql_r, in case you have questions or problems with comments/trackback.  I'll have a follow-up post listing all the contributions as soon as I can. Thank you all for participating, and special thanks to Adam Machanic (b|t) for all his help and for continuing this series!

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• On Reflector Pricing

  - by Nick Harrison

  I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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• Atheros AR2413 wireless not working after shutdown

  - by Chandrasekhar

  I am using a Ubuntu 11.04 on an Acer aspire 3680 laptop and my wifi is not working. I followed the below commands to install the madwifi driver: sudo su apt-get install subversion cd /usr/src svn checkout http://madwifi-project.org/svn/madwifi/trunk madwifi tar cfvz madwifi.tgz cd madwifi make && make install echo "blacklist ath5k" /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf echo "ath_pci" /etc/modules modprobe ath_pci sudo reboot After installation I am facing the same problem. My wifi wont work after I shutdown. Infact it didn't work after suspend but I rectified that problem by the following commands: Command 1: sudo rmmod -f ath_pci sudo rfkill unblock all sudo modprobe ath_pci along with the command SUSPEND_MODULES=ath_pci added to the /etc/pm/config.d/madwifi directory. So if I suspend and then on my laptop the wifi loads well and doesn't create a problem. But if I shutdown my laptop the wifi never loads again and eachtime I have to run a Ubuntu 9.04 live CD to load it. I did try adding the Command 1 to the /etc/rc.local directory but still it doesn't work. So my question is: What should I do in order to make my wireless work without having to run a live CD of ubuntu 9.04 everytime after shutdown? Thanks. Here are the outputs which one might need: Output 1 chandru@chandru-acer:~$ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family SMBus Controller (rev 02) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8038 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 14) 0a:03.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01) 0a:09.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller 0a:09.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD) Output 2: lsmod Module Size Used by wlan_tkip 17074 2 binfmt_misc 13213 1 parport_pc 32111 0 ppdev 12849 0 snd_hda_codec_si3054 12924 1 snd_hda_codec_realtek 255882 1 joydev 17322 0 snd_atiixp_modem 18624 0 snd_via82xx_modem 18305 0 snd_intel8x0m 18493 0 snd_ac97_codec 105614 3 snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m snd_hda_intel 24113 2 ac97_bus 12642 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_hda_codec 90901 3 snd_hda_codec_si3054,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel i915 451053 3 snd_hwdep 13274 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 80042 7 snd_hda_codec_si3054,snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m,snd_ac97_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25269 1 snd_seq_midi drm_kms_helper 40971 1 i915 snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 51291 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event pcmcia 39671 0 snd_timer 28659 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14110 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq drm 184164 4 i915,drm_kms_helper yenta_socket 27230 0 tifm_7xx1 12898 0 wlan_scan_sta 21945 1 ath_rate_sample 17279 1 pcmcia_rsrc 18292 1 yenta_socket psmouse 73312 0 tifm_core 15040 1 tifm_7xx1 snd 55295 18 snd_hda_codec_si3054,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m,snd_ac97_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device serio_raw 12990 0 i2c_algo_bit 13184 1 i915 soundcore 12600 1 snd pcmcia_core 21505 3 pcmcia,yenta_socket,pcmcia_rsrc video 19112 1 i915 ath_pci 183044 0 snd_page_alloc 14073 5 snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m,snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm wlan 224640 5 wlan_tkip,wlan_scan_sta,ath_rate_sample,ath_pci ath_hal 398701 3 ath_rate_sample,ath_pci lp 13349 0 parport 36746 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp usbhid 41704 0 hid 77084 1 usbhid sky2 49172 0 Output 3 root@chandru-acer:~# lshw -C network PCI (sysfs) *-network description: Ethernet interface product: 88E8038 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller vendor: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 14 serial: 00:16:36:fb:aa:64 capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm vpd msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=sky2 driverversion=1.28 firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:43 memory:44000000-44003fff ioport:2000(size=256) *-network description: Wireless interface product: AR2413 802.11bg NIC vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 3 bus info: pci@0000:0a:03.0 logical name: wifi0 version: 01 serial: 00:19:7d:d3:0c:fd width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list logical ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath_pci ip=192.168.1.6 latency=96 maxlatency=28 mingnt=10 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11g resources: irq:18 memory:d0000000-d000ffff Output 4 root@chandru-acer:~# lsmod | grep ath_pci ath_pci 183044 0 wlan 224640 5 wlan_tkip,wlan_scan_sta,ath_rate_sample,ath_pci ath_hal 398701 3 ath_rate_sample,ath_pci

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• What Counts For a DBA: Fitness

  - by Louis Davidson

  If you know me, you can probably guess that physical exercise is not really my thing. There was a time in my past when it a larger part of my life, but even then never in the same sort of passionate way as a number of our SQL friends.  For me, I find that mental exercise satisfies what I believe to be the same inner need that drives people to run farther than I like to drive on most Saturday mornings, and it is certainly just as addictive. Mental fitness shares many common traits with physical fitness, especially the need to attain it through repetitive training. I only wish that mental training burned off a bacon cheeseburger in the same manner as does jogging around a dewy park on Saturday morning. In physical training, there are at least two goals, the first of which is to be physically able to do a task. The second is to train the brain to perform the task without thinking too hard about it. No matter how long it has been since you last rode a bike, you will be almost certainly be able to hop on and start riding without thinking about the process of pedaling or balancing. If you’ve never ridden a bike, you could be a physics professor /Olympic athlete and still crash the first few times you try, even though you are as strong as an ox and your knowledge of the physics of bicycle riding makes the concept child’s play. For programming tasks, the process is very similar. As a DBA, you will come to know intuitively how to backup, optimize, and secure database systems. As a data programmer, you will work to instinctively use the clauses of Transact-SQL DML so that, when you need to group data three ways (and not four), you will know to use the GROUP BY clause with GROUPING SETS without resorting to a search engine.  You have the skill. Making it naturally then requires repetition and experience is the primary requirement, not just simply learning about a topic. The hardest part of being really good at something is this difference between knowledge and skill. I have recently taken several informative training classes with Kimball University on data warehousing and ETL. Now I have a lot more knowledge about designing data warehouses than before. I have also done a good bit of data warehouse designing of late and have started to improve to some level of proficiency with the theory. Yet, for all of this head knowledge, it is still a struggle to take what I have learned and apply it to the designs I am working on.  Data warehousing is still a task that is not yet deeply ingrained in my brain muscle memory. On the other hand, relational database design is something that no matter how much or how little I may get to do it, I am comfortable doing it. I have done it as a profession now for well over a decade, I teach classes on it, and I also have done (and continue to do) a lot of mental training beyond the work day. Sometimes the training is just basic education, some reading blogs and attending sessions at PASS events.  My best training comes from spending time working on other people’s design issues in forums (though not nearly as much as I would like to lately). Working through other people’s problems is a great way to exercise your brain on problems with which you’re not immediately familiar. The final bit of exercise I find useful for cultivating mental fitness for a data professional is also probably the nerdiest thing that I will ever suggest you do.  Akin to running in place, the idea is to work through designs in your head. I have designed more than one database system that would revolutionize grocery store operations, sales at my local Target store, the ordering process at Amazon, and ways to improve Disney World operations to get me through a line faster (some of which they are starting to implement without any of my help.) Never are the designs truly fleshed out, but enough to work through structures and processes.  On “paper”, I have designed database systems to catalog things as trivial as my Lego creations, rental car companies and my audio and video collections. Once I get the database designed mentally, sometimes I will create the database, add some data (often using Red-Gate’s Data Generator), and write a few queries to see if a concept was realistic, but I will rarely fully flesh out the database since I have no desire to do any user interface programming anymore.  The mental training allows me to keep in practice for when the time comes to do the work I love the most for real…even if I have been spending most of my work time lately building data warehouses.  If you are really strong of mind and body, perhaps you can mix a mental run with a physical run; though don’t run off of a cliff while contemplating how you might design a database to catalog the trees on a mountain…that would be contradictory to the purpose of both types of exercise.

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• What Counts for a DBA: Humility

  - by drsql

  In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the  application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do.   Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

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• CPU Usage in Very Large Coherence Clusters

  - by jpurdy

  When sizing Coherence installations, one of the complicating factors is that these installations (by their very nature) tend to be application-specific, with some being large, memory-intensive caches, with others acting as I/O-intensive transaction-processing platforms, and still others performing CPU-intensive calculations across the data grid. Regardless of the primary resource requirements, Coherence sizing calculations are inherently empirical, in that there are so many permutations that a simple spreadsheet approach to sizing is rarely optimal (though it can provide a good starting estimate). So we typically recommend measuring actual resource usage (primarily CPU cycles, network bandwidth and memory) at a given load, and then extrapolating from those measurements. Of course there may be multiple types of load, and these may have varying degrees of correlation -- for example, an increased request rate may drive up the number of objects "pinned" in memory at any point, but the increase may be less than linear if those objects are naturally shared by concurrent requests. But for most reasonably-designed applications, a linear resource model will be reasonably accurate for most levels of scale. However, at extreme scale, sizing becomes a bit more complicated as certain cluster management operations -- while very infrequent -- become increasingly critical. This is because certain operations do not naturally tend to scale out. In a small cluster, sizing is primarily driven by the request rate, required cache size, or other application-driven metrics. In larger clusters (e.g. those with hundreds of cluster members), certain infrastructure tasks become intensive, in particular those related to members joining and leaving the cluster, such as introducing new cluster members to the rest of the cluster, or publishing the location of partitions during rebalancing. These tasks have a strong tendency to require all updates to be routed via a single member for the sake of cluster stability and data integrity. Fortunately that member is dynamically assigned in Coherence, so it is not a single point of failure, but it may still become a single point of bottleneck (until the cluster finishes its reconfiguration, at which point this member will have a similar load to the rest of the members). The most common cause of scaling issues in large clusters is disabling multicast (by configuring well-known addresses, aka WKA). This obviously impacts network usage, but it also has a large impact on CPU usage, primarily since the senior member must directly communicate certain messages with every other cluster member, and this communication requires significant CPU time. In particular, the need to notify the rest of the cluster about membership changes and corresponding partition reassignments adds stress to the senior member. Given that portions of the network stack may tend to be single-threaded (both in Coherence and the underlying OS), this may be even more problematic on servers with poor single-threaded performance. As a result of this, some extremely large clusters may be configured with a smaller number of partitions than ideal. This results in the size of each partition being increased. When a cache server fails, the other servers will use their fractional backups to recover the state of that server (and take over responsibility for their backed-up portion of that state). The finest granularity of this recovery is a single partition, and the single service thread can not accept new requests during this recovery. Ordinarily, recovery is practically instantaneous (it is roughly equivalent to the time required to iterate over a set of backup backing map entries and move them to the primary backing map in the same JVM). But certain factors can increase this duration drastically (to several seconds): large partitions, sufficiently slow single-threaded CPU performance, many or expensive indexes to rebuild, etc. The solution of course is to mitigate each of those factors but in many cases this may be challenging. Larger clusters also lead to the temptation to place more load on the available hardware resources, spreading CPU resources thin. As an example, while we've long been aware of how garbage collection can cause significant pauses, it usually isn't viewed as a major consumer of CPU (in terms of overall system throughput). Typically, the use of a concurrent collector allows greater responsiveness by minimizing pause times, at the cost of reducing system throughput. However, at a recent engagement, we were forced to turn off the concurrent collector and use a traditional parallel "stop the world" collector to reduce CPU usage to an acceptable level. In summary, there are some less obvious factors that may result in excessive CPU consumption in a larger cluster, so it is even more critical to test at full scale, even though allocating sufficient hardware may often be much more difficult for these large clusters.

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• To refund or not to refund this client?

  - by Mahalia Samuels

  I'd really appreciate your advice on an ongoing project. I presented my client with a proposal and design samples which he approved, and he paid in full instead of the 50% upfront deposit as I'd given him a generous discount. He was then slow in furnishing me with some of the content, but once we did, he expected the website to be finished immediately which was not possible. Because he needed it done urgently, we agreed to try to get it done about 10 working days after the content was provided, but the developer who was helping me let me down. The next week, I completed the website myself and uploaded it to the server on a Friday afternoon. He then calls and texts me on following Sunday while I'm at church to say it's not online (there was probably a problem with his browser). The next morning, I received an email from him demanding a full refund within two days because he couldn't see the website (even though it was live, and I tested it on multiple browsers, a different computer and my phone), and he called me shouting at me because he couldn't access it. Finally when he was able to access it, he was unhappy with a certain detail regarding the slideshow which I began fixing and which was done the next day. He then referred me to another website and said he wanted it to look similar but not identical to it in terms of the layout. He also now wanted to add more features which were not in the original design. I got a designer to work on a new design which I sent to him for review, which if approved would be completed by 15 October, and he approved it last Thursday. He then called me yesterday to say that he wanted to change the design - he only approved it out of impatience. He now wants the website to be more similar to the other website he referred me to and he wants it done before the 15th! Then, he says to me that other people have done websites for him in three days - website's he's complained to me about for lacking dimension because they were just premium themes, whereas we'd designed and coded from scratch. I'm thinking of finishing the website but refunding him in full (or at least the refundable 50%) less domain registration and other non-refundable amounts, just to avoid further escalation of this matter and having him call me next week and say he wants to change it again. These are the applicable terms and conditions as laid out in the agreement: Total amount due for this project is Amount A. Client shall pay Consultant a deposit of Amount B (50% of total amount due for project) in advance before any work commences on the Project. The balance is due within 7 working days of completion of project. Deposit is non-refundable. Should client opt to host elsewhere, applicable transferral fee of Amount C will apply. Estimated project completion time frame is 14 to 30 days from the date Client furnishes Consultant with Brief and all other required media and data, provided that Client has made payment to secure the project. Consultant will make every effort to meet agreed upon due dates. The Client should be aware that failure to submit required information or materials, or last minute changes and excessive changes may cause subsequent delays. Client delays could result in significant delays in delivery of finished work. Major changes in client input or direction or brief will be charged at normal rates. Any work the Client wishes Consultant to create, which is not specified in the attached Proposal will be considered an additional service. Client agrees to pay Consultant for any additional expenses or additional services not included in the attached quotation and proposal if requested by the Client. Web design credit in the name of the Consultant, and link to Consultant’s website shall be placed on the footer of the final Website. Either party may terminate this Agreement by giving 7 days written notice to the other of such termination. In the event that Work is postponed or terminated at the request of the Client, Consultant shall have the right to bill pro rata at full rates for work completed through the date of that request, while reserving all rights under this Agreement. If additional payment is due, this shall be payable within seven days of the Client's written notification to stop work. In the event of termination, the Client shall also pay any expenses incurred by Consultant and the Consultant shall own all rights to the Work. Advice please?

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• High Availability for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in the Cloud

  - by BuckWoody

  Outages, natural disasters and unforeseen events have proved that even in a distributed architecture, you need to plan for High Availability (HA). In this entry I'll explain a few considerations for HA within Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In a separate post I'll talk more about Disaster Recovery (DR), since each paradigm has a different way to handle that. Planning for HA in IaaS IaaS involves Virtual Machines - so in effect, an HA strategy here takes on many of the same characteristics as it would on-premises. The primary difference is that the vendor controls the hardware, so you need to verify what they do for things like local redundancy and so on from the hardware perspective. As far as what you can control and plan for, the primary factors fall into three areas: multiple instances, geographical dispersion and task-switching. In almost every cloud vendor I've studied, to ensure your application will be protected by any level of HA, you need to have at least two of the Instances (VM's) running. This makes sense, but you might assume that the vendor just takes care of that for you - they don't. If a single VM goes down (for whatever reason) then the access to it is lost. Depending on multiple factors, you might be able to recover the data, but you should assume that you can't. You should keep a sync to another location (perhaps the vendor's storage system in another geographic datacenter or to a local location) to ensure you can continue to serve your clients. You'll also need to host the same VM's in another geographical location. Everything from a vendor outage to a network path problem could prevent your users from reaching the system, so you need to have multiple locations to handle this. This means that you'll have to figure out how to manage state between the geo's. If the system goes down in the middle of a transaction, you need to figure out what part of the process the system was in, and then re-create or transfer that state to the second set of systems. If you didn't write the software yourself, this is non-trivial. You'll also need a manual or automatic process to detect the failure and re-route the traffic to your secondary location. You could flip a DNS entry (if your application can tolerate that) or invoke another process to alias the first system to the second, such as load-balancing and so on. There are many options, but all of them involve coding the state into the application layer. If you've simply moved a state-ful application to VM's, you may not be able to easily implement an HA solution. Planning for HA in PaaS Implementing HA in PaaS is a bit simpler, since it's built on the concept of stateless applications deployment. Once again, you need at least two copies of each element in the solution (web roles, worker roles, etc.) to remain available in a single datacenter. Also, you need to deploy the application again in a separate geo, but the advantage here is that you could work out a "shared storage" model such that state is auto-balanced across the world. In fact, you don't have to maintain a "DR" site, the alternate location can be live and serving clients, and only take on extra load if the other site is not available. In Windows Azure, you can use the Traffic Manager service top route the requests as a type of auto balancer. Even with these benefits, I recommend a second backup of storage in another geographic location. Storage is inexpensive; and that second copy can be used for not only HA but DR. Planning for HA in SaaS In Software-as-a-Service (such as Office 365, or Hadoop in Windows Azure) You have far less control over the HA solution, although you still maintain the responsibility to ensure you have it. Since each SaaS is different, check with the vendor on the solution for HA - and make sure you understand what they do and what you are responsible for. They may have no HA for that solution, or pin it to a particular geo, or perhaps they have a massive HA built in with automatic load balancing (which is often the case).   All of these options (with the exception of SaaS) involve higher costs for the design. Do not sacrifice reliability for cost - that will always cost you more in the end. Build in the redundancy and HA at the very outset of the project - if you try to tack it on later in the process the business will push back and potentially not implement HA. References: http://www.bing.com/search?q=windows+azure+High+Availability  (each type of implementation is different, so I'm routing you to a search on the topic - look for the "Patterns and Practices" results for the area in Azure you're interested in)

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• Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

  For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

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• Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System Databases

  For a majority of software developers little time is spent understanding the inner workings of the database management systems (DBMS) they use to store data for their applications.  I personally place myself in this grouping. In my case, I have used various versions of Microsoft’s SQL Server (2000, 2005, and 2008 R2) and just recently learned how valuable they really are when I was preparing to deliver a lecture on "SQL Server 2008 R2, System Databases". Microsoft Sql Server 2008 R2 System DatabasesSo what are system databases in MS SQL Server, and why should I know them? Microsoft uses system databases to support the SQL Server DBMS, much like a developer uses config files or database tables to support an application. These system databases individually provide specific functionality that allows MS SQL Server to function. Name Database File Log File Master master.mdf mastlog.ldf Resource mssqlsystemresource.mdf mssqlsystemresource.ldf Model model.mdf modellog.ldf MSDB msdbdata.mdf msdblog.ldf Distribution distmdl.mdf distmdl.ldf TempDB tempdb.mdf templog.ldf Master DatabaseIf you have used MS SQL Server then you should recognize the Master database especially if you used the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to connect to a user created database. MS SQL Server requires the Master database in order for DBMS to start due to the information that it stores. Examples of data stored in the Master database User Logins Linked Servers Configuration information Information on User Databases Resource DatabaseHonestly, until recently I never knew this database even existed until I started to research SQL Server system databases. The reason for this is due largely to the fact that the resource database is hidden to users. In fact, the database files are stored within the Binn folder instead of the standard MS SQL Server database folder path. This database contains all system objects that can be accessed by all other databases.  In short, this database contains all system views and store procedures that appear in all other user databases regarding system information. One of the many benefits to storing system views and store procedures in a single hidden database is the fact it improves upgrading a SQL Server database; not to mention that maintenance is decreased since only one code base has to be mainlined for all of the system views and procedures. Model DatabaseThe Model database as the name implies is the model for all new databases created by users. This allows for predefining default database objects for all new databases within a MS SQL Server instance. For example, if every database created by a user needs to have an “Audit” table when it is  created then defining the “Audit” table in the model will guarantees that the table will be located in every new database create after the model is altered. MSDB DatabaseThe MSDBdatabase is used by SQL Server Agent, SQL Server Database Mail, SQL Server Service Broker, along with SQL Server. The SQL Server Agent uses this database to store job configurations and SQL job schedules along with SQL Alerts, and Operators. In addition, this database also stores all SQL job parameters along with each job’s execution history.  Finally, this database is also used to store database backup and maintenance plans as well as details pertaining to SQL Log shipping if it is being used. Distribution DatabaseThe Distribution database is only used during replication and stores meta data and history information pertaining to the act of replication data. Furthermore, when transactional replication is used this database also stores information regarding each transaction. It is important to note that replication is not turned on by default in MS SQL Server and that the distribution database is hidden from SSMS. Tempdb DatabaseThe Tempdb as the name implies is used to store temporary data and data objects. Examples of this include temp tables and temp store procedures. It is important to note that when using this database all data and data objects are cleared from this database when SQL Server restarts. This database is also used by SQL Server when it is performing some internal operations. Typically, SQL Server uses this database for the purpose of large sort and index operations. Finally, this database is used to store row versions if row versioning or snapsot isolation transactions are being used by SQL Server. Additionally, I would love to hear from others about their experiences using system databases, tables, and objects in a real world environments.

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• 2012&ndash;The End Of The World Review

  - by Tim Murphy

  The end of the world must be coming.  Not because the Mayan calendar says so, but because Microsoft is innovating more than Apple.  It has been a crazy year, with pundits declaring not that the end of the world is coming, but that the end of Microsoft is coming.  Let’s take a look at what 2012 has brought us. The beginning of year is a blur.  I managed to get to TechEd in June which was the first time that I got to take a deep dive into Windows 8 and many other things that had been announced in 2011.  The promise I saw in these products was really encouraging.  The thought of being able to run Windows 8 from a thumb drive or have Hyper-V native to the OS told me that at least for developers good things were coming. I finally got my feet wet with Windows 8 with the developer preview just prior to the RTM.  While the initial experience was a bit of a culture shock I quickly grew to love it.  The media still seems to hold little love for the “reimagined” platform, but I think that once people spend some time with it they will enjoy the experience and what the FUD mongers say will fade into the background.  With the launch of the OS we finally got a look at the Surface.  I think this is a bold entry into the tablet market.  While I wish it was a little more affordable I am already starting to see them in the wild being used by non-techies. I was waiting for Windows Phone 8 at least as much as Windows 8, probably more.  The new hardware, better marketing and new OS features I think are going to finally push us to the point of having a real presence in the smartphone market.  I am seeing a number of iPhone users picking up a Nokia Lumia 920 and getting rid of their brand new iPhone 5.  The only real debacle that I saw around the launch was when they held back the SDK from general developers. Shortly after the launch events came Build 2012.  I was extremely disappointed that I didn’t make it to this year’s Build.  Even if they weren’t handing out Surface and Lumia devices I think the atmosphere and content were something that really needed to be experience in person.  Hopefully there will be a Build next year and it’s schedule will be announced soon.  As you would expect Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development were the mainstay of the conference, but improvements in Azure also played a key role.  This movement of services to the cloud will continue and we need to understand where it best fits into the solutions we build. Lower on the radar this year were Office 2013, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012.  Their glory stolen by the consumer OS and hardware announcements, these new releases are no less important.  Companies will see significant improvements in performance and capabilities if they upgrade.  At TechEd they had shown some of the new features of Windows Server 2012 around hardware integration and Hyper-V performance which absolutely blew me away.  It is our job to bring these important improvements to our company’s attention so that they can be leveraged. Personally, the consulting business in 2012 was the busiest it has been in a long time.  More companies were ready to attack new projects after several years of putting them on the back burner.  I also worked to bring back momentum to the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Both the community and clients are excited about the new technologies that have come out in 2012 and now it is time to deliver. What does 2013 have in store.  I don’t see it be quite as exciting as 2012.  Microsoft will be releasing the Surface Pro in January and it seems that we will see more frequent OS update for Windows.  There are rumors that we may see a Surface phone in 2013.  It has also been announced that there will finally be a rework of the XBox next fall.  The new year will also be a time for us in the development community to take advantage of these new tools and devices.  After all, it is what we build on top of these platforms that will attract more consumers and corporations to using them. Just as I am 99.999% sure that the world is not going to end this year, I am also sure that Microsoft will move on and that most of this negative backlash from the media is actually fear and jealousy.  In the end I think we have a promising year ahead of us. del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft,Pundits,Mayans,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Surface

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