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• PeopleSoft at Alliance 2012 Executive Forum

  - by John Webb

  Guest Posting From Rebekah Jackson This week I jointed over 4,800 Higher Ed and Public Sector customers and partners in Nashville at our annual Alliance conference.   I got lost easily in the hallways of the sprawling Gaylord Opryland Hotel. I carried the resort map with me, and I would still stand for several minutes at a very confusing junction, studying the map and the signage on the walls. Hallways led off in many directions, some with elevators going down here and stairs going up there. When I took a wrong turn I would instantly feel stuck, lose my bearings, and occasionally even have to send out a call for help.    It strikes me that the theme for the Executive Forum this year outlines a less tangible but equally disorienting set of challenges that our higher education customer’s CIOs are facing: Making Decisions at the Intersection of Business Value, Strategic Investment, and Enterprise Technology. The forces acting upon higher education institutions today are not neat, straight-forward decision points, where one can glance to the right, glance to the left, and then quickly choose the best course of action. The operational, technological, and strategic factors that must be considered are complex, interrelated, messy…and the stakes are high. Michael Horn, co-author of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns”, set the tone for the day. He introduced the model of disruptive innovation, which grew out of the research he and his colleagues have done on ‘Why Successful Organizations Fail’. Highly simplified, the pattern he shared is that things start out decentralized, take a leap to extreme centralization, and then experience progressive decentralization. Using computers as an example, we started with a slide rule, then developed the computer which centralized in the form of mainframes, and gradually decentralized to mini-computers, desktop computers, laptops, and now mobile devices. According to Michael, you have more computing power in your cell phone than existed on the planet 60 years ago, or was on the first rocket that went to the moon. Applying this pattern to Higher Education means the introduction of expensive and prestigious private universities, followed by the advent of state schools, then by community colleges, and now online education. Michael shared statistics that indicate 50% of students will be taking at least one on line course by 2014…and by some measures, that’s already the case today. The implication is that technology moves from being the backbone of the campus, the IT department’s domain, and pushes into the academic core of the institution. Innovative programs are underway at many schools like Bellevue and BYU Idaho, joined by startups and disruptive new players like the Khan Academy.   This presents both threat and opportunity for higher education institutions, and means that IT decisions cannot afford to be disconnected from the institution’s strategic plan. Subsequent sessions explored this theme.    Theo Bosnak, from Attain, discussed the model they use for assessing the complete picture of an institution’s financial health. Compounding the issue are the dramatic trends occurring in technology and the vendors that provide it. Ovum analyst Nicole Engelbert, shared her insights next and suggested that incremental changes are no longer an option, instead fundamental changes are affecting the landscape of enterprise technology in higher ed.    Nicole closed with her recommendation that institutions focus on the trends in higher education with an eye towards the strategic requirements and business value first. Technology then is the enabler.   The last presentation of the day was from Tom Fisher, Sr. Vice President of Cloud Services at Oracle. Tom runs the delivery arm of the Cloud Services group, and shared his thoughts candidly about his experiences with cloud deployments as well as key issues around managing costs and security in cloud deployments. Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground at this point, from financials planning, business strategy, and cloud computing, with the possibility that half of the institutions in the US might not be around in their current form 10 years from now. Did I forget to mention that was raised in the morning session? Seems a little hard to believe, and yet Michael Horn made a compelling point. Apparently 100 years ago, 8 of the top 10 education institutions in the world were German. Today, the leading German school is ranked somewhere in the 40’s or 50’s. What will the landscape be 100 years from now? Will there be an institution from China, India, or Brazil in the top 10? As Nicole suggested, maybe US parents will be sending their children to schools overseas much sooner, faced with the ever-increasing costs of a US based education. Will corporations begin to view skill-based certification from an online provider as a viable alternative to a 4 year degree from an accredited institution, fundamentally altering the education industry as we know it?

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• Introducing jLight &ndash; Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery.

  - by Timmy Kokke

  Introduction With the recent news about Silverlight on the Windows Phone and all the great Out-Of-Browser features in the upcoming Silverlight 4 you almost forget Silverlight is a browser plugin. It most often runs in a web browser and often as a control. In many cases you need to communicate with the browser to get information about textboxes, events or details about the browser itself. To do this you can use JavaScript from Silverlight. Although Silverlight works the same on every browser, JavaScript does not and it won’t be long before problems arise. To overcome differences in browser I like to use jQuery. The only downside of doing this is that there’s a lot more code needed that you would normally use when you write jQuery in JavaScript. Lately, I had to catch changes is the browser scrollbar and act to the new position. I also had to move the scrollbar when the user dragged around in the Silverlight application. With jQuery it was peanuts to get and set the right attributes, but I found that I had to write a lot of code on Silverlight side.  With a few refactoring I had a separated out the plumbing into a new class and could call only a few methods on that to get the same thing done. The idea for jLight was born. jLight vs. jQuery The main purpose of jLight is to take the ease of use of jQuery and bring it into Silverlight for handling DOM interaction. For example, to change the text color of a DIV to red, in jQuery you would write: jQuery("div").css("color","red"); In jLight the same thing looks like so: jQuery.Select("div").Css("color","red");   Another example. To change the offset in of the last SPAN you could write this in jQuery : jQuery("span:last").offset({left : 10, top : 100});   In jLight this would do the same: jQuery.Select("span:last").Offset(new {left = 10, top = 100 });   Callbacks Nothing too special so far. To get the same thing done using the “normal” HtmlPage.Window.Eval, it wouldn’t require too much effort. But to wire up a handler for events from the browser it’s a whole different story. Normally you need to register ScriptMembers, ScriptableTypes or write some code in JavaScript. jLight takes care of the plumbing and provide you with an simple interface in the same way jQuery would. If you would like to handle the scroll event of the BODY of your html page, you’ll have to bind the event using jQuery and have a function call back to a registered function in Silverlight. In the example below I assume there’s a method “SomeMethod” and it is registered as a ScriptableObject as “RegisteredFromSilverlight” from Silverlight.   jQuery("body:first").scroll(function() { var sl = document.getElementbyId("SilverlightControl"); sl.content.RegisteredFromSilverlight.SomeMethod($(this)); });       Using jLight  in Silverlight the code would be even simpler. The registration of RegisteredFromSilverlight  as ScriptableObject can be omitted.  Besides that, you don’t have to write any JavaScript or evaluate strings with JavaScript.   jQuery.Select("body:first").scroll(SomeMethod);   Lambdas Using a lambda in Silverlight can make it even simpler.  Each is the jQuery equivalent of foreach in C#. It calls a function for every element found by jQuery. In this example all INPUT elements of the text type are selected. The FromObject method is used to create a jQueryObject from an object containing a ScriptObject. The Val method from jQuery is used to get the value of the INPUT elements.   jQuery.Select("input:text").Each((element, index) => { textBox1.Text += jQueryObject.FromObject(element).Val(); return null; });   Ajax One thing jQuery is often used for is making Ajax calls. Making calls to services to external services can be done from Silverlight, but as easy as using jQuery. As an example I would like to show how jLight does this. Below is the entire code behind. It searches my name on twitter and shows the result. This example can be found in the source of the project. The GetJson method passes a Silverlight JsonValue to a callback. This callback instantiates Twit objects and adds them to a ListBox called TwitList.   public partial class DemoPage2 : UserControl { public DemoPage2() { InitializeComponent(); jQuery.Load(); }   private void CallButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { jQuery.GetJson("http://search.twitter.com/search.json?lang=en&q=sorskoot", Done); }   private void Done(JsonValue arg) { var tweets = new List<Twit>(); foreach (JsonObject result in arg["results"]) { tweets.Add(new Twit() { Text = (string)result["text"], Image = (string)result["profile_image_url"], User = (string)result["from_user"] } ); } TwitList.ItemsSource = tweets; } }   public class Twit { public string User { get; set; } public string Image { get; set; } public string Text { get; set; } }   Conclusion Although jLight is still in development it can be used already.There isn’t much documentation yet, but if you know jQuery jLight isn’t very hard to use.  If you would like to try it, please let me know what you think and report any problems you run in to. jLight can be found at:   http://jlight.codeplex.com

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• The first day of JavaOne is already over!

  - by delabassee

  In the past Sunday used to be a more relaxing day with ‘just’ some JavaOne activities going on. Sunday used to be a soft day to prepare yourself for an exhausting week. This is now over as JavaOne is expanding; Sunday is now an integral part of the conference. One of the side effect of this extra day is that some activities related to JavaOne and OpenWorld such as MySQL Connect are being push to start a day earlier on Saturday (can you spot the pattern here?). On the GlassFish front, Sunday was a very busy day! It started at the Moscone Center with the annual GlassFish Community Event where the Java EE 7 and GF 4 roadmaps were presented and discussed. During the event, different GlassFish users such as ZeroTurnaround (the JRebel guys), Grupo RBS and IDR Solutions shared their views on GF, why they like GF but also what could be improved. The event was also a forum for the GF community to exchange with some of the key Java EE / GlassFish Oracle Executives and the different GF team members. The Strategy keynote and the Technical keynote were held in the Masonic Auditorium later in the after-noon. Oracle executives have presented the plans for Java SE, Java FX and Java EE. As on-demand replays will be available soon, I will not summarize several hours of content but here are some personal takeaways from those keynotes. Modularity Modularity is a big deal. We know by now that Project Jigsaw will not be ready for Java SE 8 but in any case, it is already possible (and encouraged) to test Jigsaw today. In the future, Java EE plan to rely on the modularity features provided by Java SE, so Project Jigsaw is also relevant for Java EE developers. Shorter term, to cover some of the modular requirements, Java SE will adopt the approach that was used for Java EE 6 and the notion of Profiles. This approach does not define a module system per say; Profiles is a way to clearly define different subsets of Java SE to fulfill different needs (e.g. the full JRE is not required for a headless application). The introduction of different Profiles, from the Base profile (10mb) to the Full Profile (+50mb), has been proposed for Java SE 8. Embedded Embedded is a strong theme going forward for the Java Plaform. There is now a dedicated program : Java Embedded @ JavaOne Java by nature (e.g. platform independence, built-in security, ability easily talks to any back-end systems, large set of skills available on the market, etc.) is probably the most suited platform for the Internet of Things. You can quickly be up-to-speed and develop services and applications for that space just by using your current Java skills. All you need to start developing on ARM is a 35$ Raspberry Pi ARM board (25$ if you are cheap and can live without an ethernet connection) and the recently released JDK for Linux/ARM. Obviously, GlassFish runs on Raspberry Pi. If you wan to go further in the embedded space, you should take a look Java SE Embedded, an optimized, low footprint, Java environment that support the major embedded architectures (ARM, PPC and x86). Finally, Oracle has recently introduced Java Embedded Suite, a new solution that brings modern middleware capabilities to the embedded space. Java Embedded Suite is an optimized solution that leverage Java SE Embedded but also GlassFish, Jersey and JavaDB to deploy advanced value added capabilities (eg. sensor data filtering and) deeper in the network, closer to the devices. JavaFX JavaFX is going strong! Starting from Java SE 7u6, JavaFX is bundled with the JDK. JavaFX is now available for all the major desktop platforms (Windows, Linux and Mac OS X). JavaFX is now also available, in developer preview, for low end device running Linux/ARM. During the keynote, JavaFX was shown running on a Raspberry Pi! And as announced during the keynote, JavaFX should be fully open-sourced by the end of the year; contributions are welcome!. There is a strong momentum around JavaFX, it’s the ideal client solution for the Java platform. A client layer that works perfectly with GlassFish on the back-end. If you were not convince by JavaFX, it’s time to reconsider it! As an old Chinese proverb say “One tweet is worth a thousand words!” HTML5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 HTML5 got a lot of airtime too, it was covered during the Java EE 7 section of the keynote. Some details about Project Avatar, Oracle’s incubator project for a TSA (Thin Server Architecture) solution, were diluted and shown during the keynote. On the tooling side, Project Easel running on NetBeans 7.3 beta was demo’ed, including a cool NetBeans debugging session running in Chrome! HTML 5, Project Avatar and Java EE 7 deserve separate posts... Feedback We need your feedback! There are many projects, JSRs and products cooking : GlassFish 4, Project Jigsaw, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE (JSR 236), OpenJFX, OpenJDK to name just a few. Those projects, those specifications will have a profound impact on the Java platform for the years to come! So if you have the opportunity, download, install, learn, tests them and give feedback! Remember, you can "Make the Future Java!" Finally, the traditional GlassFish Party at the Thirsty Bear concluded the first JavaOne day. This party is another place where the community can freely exchange with the GlassFish team in a more relaxed, more friendly (but sometime more noisy) atmosphere. Arun has posted a set of pictures to reflect the atmosphere of the keynotes and the GlassFish party. You can find more details on the others Java EE and GlassFish activities here.

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• Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 7 - Getting Started

  - by arungupta

  Adopt-a-JSR is an initiative started by JUG leaders to encourage JUG members to get involved in a JSR, in order to increase grass roots participation. This allows JUG members to provide early feedback to specifications before they are finalized in the JCP. The standards in turn become more complete and developer-friendly after getting feedback from a wide variety of audience. adoptajsr.org provide more details about the logistics and benefits for you and your JUG. A similar activity was conducted for OpenJDK as well. Markus Eisele also provide a great introduction to the program (in German). Java EE 7 (JSR 342) is scheduled to go final in Q2 2013. There are several new JSRs that are getting included in the platform (e.g. WebSocket, JSON, and Batch), a few existing ones are getting an overhaul (e.g. JAX-RS 2 and JMS 2), and several other getting minor updates (e.g. JPA 2.1 and Servlets 3.1). Each Java EE 7 JSR can leverage your expertise and would love your JUG to adopt a JSR. What does it mean to adopt a JSR ? Your JUG is going to identify a particular JSR, or multiple JSRs, that is of interest to the JUG members. This is mostly done by polling/discussing on your local JUG members list. Your JUG will download and review the specification(s) and javadocs for clarity and completeness. The complete set of Java EE 7 specifications, their download links, and EG archives are listed here. glassfish.org/adoptajsr provide specific areas where different specification leads are looking for feedback. Your JUG can then think of a sample application that can be built using the chosen specification(s). An existing use case (from work or a personal hobby project) may be chosen to be implemented instead. This is where your creativity and uniqueness comes into play. Most of the implementations are already integrated in GlassFish 4 and others will be integrated soon. You can also explore integration of multiple technologies and provide feedback on the simplicity and ease-of-use of the programming model. Especially look for integration with existing Java EE technologies and see if you find any discrepancies. Report any missing features that may be included in future release of the specification. The most important part is to provide feedback by filing bugs on the corresponding spec or RI project. Any thing that is not clear either in the spec or implementation should be filed as a bug. This is what will ensure that specification and implementation leads are getting the required feedback and improving the quality of the final deliverable of the JSR. How do I get started ? A simple way to get started can be achieved by following S.M.A.R.T. as explained below. Specific Identify who all will be involved ? What would you like to accomplish ? For example, even though building a sample app will provide real-world validity of the API but because of time constraints you may identify that reviewing the specification and javadocs only can be accomplished. Establish a time frame by which the activities need to be complete. Measurable Define a success for metrics. For example, this could be the number of bugs filed. Remember, quality of bugs is more important that quantity of bugs. Define your end goal, for example, reviewing 4 chapters of the specification or completing the sample application. Create a dashboard that will highlight your JUG's contribution to this effort. Attainable Make sure JUG members understand the time commitment required for providing feedback. This can vary based upon the level of involvement (any is good!) and the number of specifications picked. adoptajsr.org defines different categories of involvement. Once again, any level of involvement is good. Just reviewing a chapter, a section, or javadocs for your usecase is helpful. Relevant Pick JSRs that JUG members are willing and able to work. If the JUG members are not interested then they might loose motivation half-way through. The "able" part is tricky as you can always stretch yourself and learn a new skill ;-) Time-bound Define a time table of activities with clearly defined tasks. A tentative time table may look like: Dec 25: Discuss and agree upon the specifications with JUG Jan 1: Start Adopt-a-JSR for Java EE 7 Jan 15: Initial spec reading complete. Keep thinking through the application that will be implemented. Jan 22: Early design of the sample application is ready Jan 29: JUG members agree upon the application Next 4 weeks: Implement the application Of course, you'll need to alter this based upon your commitment. Maintaining an activity dashboard will help you monitor and track the progress. Make sure to keep filing bugs through out the process! 12 JUGs from around the world (SouJava, Campinas JUG, Chennai JUG, London Java Community, BeJUG, Morocco JUG, Peru JUG, Indonesia JUG, Congo JUG, Silicon Valley JUG, Madrid JUG, and Houston JUG) have already adopted one of the Java EE 7 JSRs. I'm already helping some JUGs bootstrap and would love to help your JUG too. What are you waiting for ?

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• The Oracle Graduate Experience...A Graduates Perspective by Angelie Tierney

  - by david.talamelli

  [Note: Angelie has just recently joined Oracle in Australia in our 2011 Graduate Program. Last week I shared my thoughts on our 2011 Graduate Program, this week Angelie took some time to share her thoughts of our Graduate Program. The notes below are Angelie's overview from her experience with us starting with our first contact last year - David Talamelli] How does the 1 year program work? It consists of 3 weeks of training, followed by 2 rotations in 2 different Lines of Business (LoB's). The first rotation goes for 4 months, while your 2nd rotation goes for 7, when you are placed into your final LoB for the program. The interview process: After sorting through the many advertised graduate jobs, submitting so many resumes and studying at the same time, it can all be pretty stressful. Then there is the interview process. David called me on a Sunday afternoon and I spoke to him for about 30 minutes in a mini sort of phone interview. I was worried that working at Oracle would require extensive technical experience, but David stressed that even the less technical, and more business-minded person could, and did, work at Oracle. I was then asked if I would like to attend a group interview in the next weeks, to which I said of course! The first interview was a day long, consisting of a brief introduction, a group interview where we worked on a business plan with a group of other potential graduates and were marked by 3 Oracle employees, on our ability to work together and presentation. After lunch, we then had a short individual interview each, and that was the end of the first round. I received a call a few weeks later, and was asked to come into a second interview, at which I also jumped at the opportunity. This was an interview based purely on your individual abilities and would help to determine which Line of Business you would go to, should you land a graduate position. So how did I cope throughout the interview stages? I believe the best tool to prepare for the interview, was to research Oracle and its culture and to see if I thought I could fit into that. I personally found out about Oracle, its partners as well as competitors and along the way, even found out about their part (or Larry Ellison's specifically) in the Iron Man 2 movie. Armed with some Oracle information and lots of enthusiasm, I approached the Oracle Graduate Interview process. Why did I apply for an Oracle graduate position? I studied a Bachelor of Business/Bachelor of Science in IT, and wanted to be able to use both my degrees, while have the ability to work internationally in the future. Coming straight from university, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do in terms of my career. With the program, you are rotated across various lines of business, to not only expose you to different parts of the business, but to also help you to figure out what you want to achieve out of your career. As a result, I thought Oracle was the perfect fit. So what can an Oracle ANZ Graduate expect? First things first, you can expect to line up for your visitor pass. Really. Next you enter a room full of unknown faces, graduates just like you, and then you realise you're in this with 18 other people, going through the same thing as you. 3 weeks later you leave with many memories, colleagues you can call your friends, and a video of your presentation. Vanessa, the Graduate Manager, will also take lots of photos and keep you (well) fed. Well that's not all you leave with, you are also equipped with a wealth of knowledge and contacts within Oracle, both that will help you throughout your career there. What training is involved? We started our Oracle experience with 3 weeks of training, consisting of employee orientation, extensive product training, presentations on the various lines of business (LoB's), followed by sales and presentation training. While there was potential for an information overload, maybe even death by Powerpoint, we were able to have access to the presentations for future reference, which was very helpful. This period also allowed us to start networking, not only with the graduates, but with the managers who presented to us, as well as through the monthly chinwag, HR celebrations and even with the sharing of tea facilities. We also had a team bonding day when we recorded a "commercial" within groups, and learned how to play an Irish drum. Overall, the training period helped us to learn about Oracle, as well as ourselves, and to prepare us for our transition into our rotations. Where to now? I'm now into my 2nd week of my first graduate rotation. It has been exciting to finally get out into the work environment and utilise that knowledge we gained from training. My manager has been a great mentor, extremely knowledgeable, and it has been good being able to participate in meetings, conference calls and make a contribution towards the business. And while we aren't necessarily working directly with the other graduates, they are still reachable via email, Pidgin and lunch and they are important as a resource and support, after all, they are going through a similar experience to you. While it is only the beginning, there is a lot more to learn and a lot more to experience along the way, especially because, as we learned during training, at Oracle, the only constant is change.

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• My First Weeks at Red Gate

  - by Jess Nickson

  Hi, my name’s Jess and early September 2012 I started working at Red Gate as a Software Engineer down in The Agency (the Publishing team). This was a bit of a shock, as I didn’t think this team would have any developers! I admit, I was a little worried when it was mentioned that my role was going to be different from normal dev. roles within the company. However, as luck would have it, I was placed within a team that was responsible for the development and maintenance of Simple-Talk and SQL Server Central (SSC). I felt rather unprepared for this role. I hadn’t used many of the technologies involved and of those that I had, I hadn’t looked at them for quite a while. I was, nevertheless, quite excited about this turn of events. As I had predicted, the role has been quite challenging so far. I expected that I would struggle to get my head round the large codebase already in place, having never used anything so much as a fraction of the size of this before. However, I was perhaps a bit naive when it came to how quickly things would move. I was required to start learning/remembering a number of different languages and technologies within time frames I would never have tried to set myself previously. Having said that, my first week was pretty easy. It was filled with meetings that were designed to get the new starters up to speed with the different departments, ideals and rules within the company. I also attended some lightning talks being presented by other employees, which were pretty useful. These occur once a fortnight and normally consist of around four speakers. In my spare time, we set up the Simple-Talk codebase on my computer and I started exploring it and worked on my first feature – redirecting requests for URLs that used incorrect casing! It was also during this time that I was given my first introduction to test-driven development (TDD) with Michael via a code kata. Although I had heard of the general ideas behind TDD, I had definitely never tried it before. Indeed, I hadn’t really done any automated testing of code before, either. The session was therefore very useful and gave me insights as to some of the coding practices used in my team. Although I now understand the importance of TDD, it still seems odd in my head and I’ve yet to master how to sensibly step up the functionality of the code a bit at a time. The second week was both easier and more difficult than the first. I was given a new project to work on, meaning I was no longer using the codebase already in place. My job was to take some designs, a WordPress theme, and some initial content and build a page that allowed users of the site to read provided resources and give feedback. This feedback could include their thoughts about the resource, the topics covered and the page design itself. Although it didn’t sound the most challenging of projects when compared to fixing bugs in our current codebase, it nevertheless provided a few sneaky problems that had me stumped. I really enjoyed working on this project as it allowed me to play around with HTML, CSS and JavaScript; all things that I like working with but rarely have a chance to use. I completed the aims for the project on time and was happy with the final outcome – though it still needs a good designer to take a look at it! I am now into my third week at Red Gate and I have temporarily been pulled off the website from week 2. I am again back to figuring out the Simple-Talk codebase. Monday provided me with the chance to learn a bunch of new things: system level testing, Selenium and Python. I was set the challenge of testing a bug fix dealing with the search bars in Simple-Talk. The exercise was pretty fun, although Mike did have to point me in the right direction when I started making the tests a bit too complex. The rest of the week looks set to be focussed on pair programming with Mike as we work together on a new feature. I look forward to the challenges that still face me and hope that I will be able to get up to speed quickly. *fingers crossed*

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• Using Delegates in C# (Part 1)

  - by rajbk

  This post provides a very basic introduction of delegates in C#. Part 2 of this post can be read here. A delegate is a class that is derived from System.Delegate.  It contains a list of one or more methods called an invocation list. When a delegate instance is “invoked” with the arguments as defined in the signature of the delegate, each of the methods in the invocation list gets invoked with the arguments. The code below shows example with static and instance methods respectively: Static Methods 1: using System; 2: using System.Linq; 3: using System.Collections.Generic; 4: 5: public delegate void SayName(string name); 6: 7: public class Program 8: { 9: [STAThread] 10: static void Main(string[] args) 11: { 12: SayName englishDelegate = new SayName(SayNameInEnglish); 13: SayName frenchDelegate = new SayName(SayNameInFrench); 14: SayName combinedDelegate =(SayName)Delegate.Combine(englishDelegate, frenchDelegate); 15: 16: combinedDelegate.Invoke("Tom"); 17: Console.ReadLine(); 18: } 19: 20: static void SayNameInFrench(string name) { 21: Console.WriteLine("J'ai m'appelle " + name); 22: } 23: 24: static void SayNameInEnglish(string name) { 25: Console.WriteLine("My name is " + name); 26: } 27: } We have declared a delegate of type SayName with return type of void and taking an input parameter of name of type string. On line 12, we create a new instance of this delegate which refers to a static method - SayNameInEnglish.  SayNameInEnglish has the same return type and parameter list as the delegate declaration.  Once a delegate is instantiated, the instance will always refer to the same target. Delegates are immutable. On line 13, we create a new instance of the delegate but point to a different static method. As you may recall, a delegate instance encapsulates an invocation list. You create an invocation list by combining delegates using the Delegate.Combine method (there is an easier syntax as you will see later). When two non null delegate instances are combined, their invocation lists get combined to form a new invocation list. This is done in line 14.  On line 16, we invoke the delegate with the Invoke method and pass in the required string parameter. Since the delegate has an invocation list with two entries, each of the method in the invocation list is invoked. If an unhandled exception occurs during the invocation of one of these methods, the exception gets bubbled up to the line where the invocation was made (line 16). If a delegate is null and you try to invoke it, you will get a System.NullReferenceException. We see the following output when the method is run: My name is TomJ'ai m'apelle Tom Instance Methods The code below outputs the same results as before. The only difference here is we are creating delegates that point to a target object (an instance of Translator) and instance methods which have the same signature as the delegate type. The target object can never be null. We also use the short cut syntax += to combine the delegates instead of Delegate.Combine. 1: public delegate void SayName(string name); 2: 3: public class Program 4: { 5: [STAThread] 6: static void Main(string[] args) 7: { 8: Translator translator = new Translator(); 9: SayName combinedDelegate = new SayName(translator.SayNameInEnglish); 10: combinedDelegate += new SayName(translator.SayNameInFrench); 11:  12: combinedDelegate.Invoke("Tom"); 13: Console.ReadLine(); 14: } 15: } 16: 17: public class Translator { 18: public void SayNameInFrench(string name) { 19: Console.WriteLine("J'ai m'appelle " + name); 20: } 21: 22: public void SayNameInEnglish(string name) { 23: Console.WriteLine("My name is " + name); 24: } 25: } A delegate can be removed from a combination of delegates by using the –= operator. Removing a delegate from an empty list or removing a delegate that does not exist in a non empty list will not result in an exception. Delegates are invoked synchronously using the Invoke method. We can also invoke them asynchronously using the BeginInvoke and EndInvoke methods which are compiler generated.

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• Infiniband: a highperformance network fabric - Part I

  - by Karoly Vegh

  Introduction:At the OpenWorld this year I managed to chat with interesting people again - one of them answering Infiniband deepdive questions with ease by coffee turned out to be one of Oracle's IB engineers, Ted Kim, who actually actively participates in the Infiniband Trade Association and integrates Oracle solutions with this highspeed network. This is why I love attending OOW. He granted me an hour of his time to talk about IB. This post is mostly based on that tech interview.Start of the actual post: Traditionally datatransfer between servers and storage elements happens in networks with up to 10 gigabit/seconds or in SANs with up to 8 gbps fiberchannel connections. Happens. Well, data rather trickles through.But nowadays data amounts grow well over the TeraByte order of magnitude, and multisocket/multicore/multithread Servers hunger data that these transfer technologies just can't deliver fast enough, causing all CPUs of this world do one thing at the same speed - waiting for data. And once again, I/O is the bottleneck in computing. FC and Ethernet can't keep up. We have half-TB SSDs, dozens of TB RAM to store data to be modified in, but can't transfer it. Can't backup fast enough, can't replicate fast enough, can't synchronize fast enough, can't load fast enough. The bad news is, everyone is used to this, like back in the '80s everyone was used to start compile jobs and go for a coffee. Or on vacation. The good news is, there's an alternative. Not so-called "bleeding-edge" 8gbps, but (as of now) 56. Not layers of overhead, but low latency. And it is available now. It has been for a while, actually. Welcome to the world of Infiniband. Short history:Infiniband was born as a result of joint efforts of HPAQ, IBM, Intel, Sun and Microsoft. They planned to implement a next-generation I/O fabric, in the 90s. In the 2000s Infiniband (from now on: IB) was quite popular in the high-performance computing field, powering most of the top500 supercomputers. Then in the middle of the decade, Oracle realized its potential and used it as an interconnect backbone for the first Database Machine, the first Exadata. Since then, IB has been booming, Oracle utilizes and supports it in a large set of its HW products, it is the backbone of the famous Engineered Systems: Exadata, SPARC SuperCluster, Exalogic, OVCA and even the new DB backup/recovery box. You can also use it to make servers talk highspeed IP to eachother, or to a ZFS Storage Appliance. Following Oracle's lead, even IBM has jumped the wagon, and leverages IB in its PureFlex systems, their first InfiniBand Machines.IB Structural Overview: If you want to use IB in your servers, the first thing you will need is PCI cards, in IB terms Host Channel Adapters, or HCAs. Just like NICs for Ethernet, or HBAs for FC. In these you plug an IB cable, going to an IB switch providing connection to other IB HCAs. Of course you're going to need drivers for those in your OS. Yes, these are long-available for Solaris and Linux. Now, what protocols can you talk over IB? There's a range of choices. See, IB isn't accepting package loss like Ethernet does, and hence doesn't need to rely on TCP/IP as a workaround for resends. That is, you still can run IP over IB (IPoIB), and that is used in various cases for control functionality, but the datatransfer can run over more efficient protocols - like native IB. About PCI connectivity: IB cards, as you see are fast. They bring low latency, which is just as important as their bandwidth. Current IB cards run at 56 gbit/s. That is slightly more than double of the capacity of a PCI Gen2 slot (of ~25 gbit/s). And IB cards are equipped usually with two ports - that is, altogether you'd need 112 gbit/s PCI slots, to be able to utilize FDR IB cards in an active-active fashion. PCI Gen3 slots provide you with around ~50gbps. This is why the most IB cards are configured in an active-standby way if both ports are used. Once again the PCI slot is the bottleneck. Anyway, the new Oracle servers are equipped with Gen3 PCI slots, an the new IB HCAs support those too. Oracle utilizes the QDR HCAs, running at 40gbp/s brutto, which translates to a 32gbp/s net traffic due to the 10:8 signal-to-data information ratio. Consolidation techniques: Technology never stops to evolve. Mellanox is working on the 100 gbps (EDR) version already, which will be optical, since signal technology doesn't allow EDR to be copper. Also, I hear you say "100gbps? I will never use/need that much". Are you sure? Have you considered consolidation scenarios, where (for example with Oracle Virtual Network) you could consolidate your platform to a high densitiy virtualized solution providing many virtual 10gbps interfaces through that 100gbps? Technology never stops to evolve. I still remember when a 10mbps network was impressively fast. Back in those days, 16MB of RAM was a lot. Now we usually run servers with around 100.000 times more RAM. If network infrastrucure speends could grow as fast as main memory capacities, we'd have a different landscape now :) You can utilize SRIOV as well for consolidation. That is, if you run LDoms (aka Oracle VM Server for SPARC) you do not have to add physical IB cards to all your guest LDoms, and you do not need to run VIO devices through the hypervisor either (avoiding overhead). You can enable SRIOV on those IB cards, which practically virtualizes the PCI bus, and you can dedicate Physical- and Virtual Functions of the virtualized HCAs as native, physical HW devices to your guests. See Raghuram's excellent post explaining SRIOV. SRIOV for IB is supported since LDoms 3.1.  This post is getting lengthier, so I will rename it to Part I, and continue it in a second post. 

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• Using Windows Previous Versions to access ZFS Snapshots (July 14, 2009)

  - by user12612012

  The Previous Versions tab on the Windows desktop provides a straightforward, intuitive way for users to view or recover files from ZFS snapshots.  ZFS snapshots are read-only, point-in-time instances of a ZFS dataset, based on the same copy-on-write transactional model used throughout ZFS.  ZFS snapshots can be used to recover deleted files or previous versions of files and they are space efficient because unchanged data is shared between the file system and its snapshots.  Snapshots are available locally via the .zfs/snapshot directory and remotely via Previous Versions on the Windows desktop. Shadow Copies for Shared Folders was introduced with Windows Server 2003 but subsequently renamed to Previous Versions with the release of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.  Windows shadow copies, or snapshots, are based on the Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) and, as the [Shared Folders part of the] name implies, are accessible to clients via SMB shares, which is good news when using the Solaris CIFS Service.  And the nice thing is that no additional configuration is required - it "just works". On Windows clients, snapshots are accessible via the Previous Versions tab in Windows Explorer using the Shadow Copy client, which is available by default on Windows XP SP2 and later.  For Windows 2000 and pre-SP2 Windows XP, the client software is available for download from Microsoft: Shadow Copies for Shared Folders Client. Assuming that we already have a shared ZFS dataset, we can create ZFS snapshots and view them from a Windows client. zfs snapshot tank/home/administrator@snap101zfs snapshot tank/home/administrator@snap102 To view the snapshots on Windows, map the dataset on the client then right click on a folder or file and select Previous Versions.  Note that Windows will only display previous versions of objects that differ from the originals.  So you may have to modify files after creating a snapshot in order to see previous versions of those files. The screenshot above shows various snapshots in the Previous Versions window, created at different times.  On the left panel, the .zfs folder is visible, illustrating that this is a ZFS share.  The .zfs setting can be toggled as desired, it makes no difference when using previous versions.  To make the .zfs folder visible: zfs set snapdir=visible tank/home/administrator To hide the .zfs folder: zfs set snapdir=hidden tank/home/administrator The following screenshot shows the Previous Versions panel when a file has been selected.  In this case the user is prompted to view, copy or restore the file from one of the available snapshots. As can be seen from the screenshots above, the Previous Versions window doesn't display snapshot names: snapshots are listed by snapshot creation time, sorted in time order from most recent to oldest.  There's nothing we can do about this, it's the way that the interface works.  Perhaps one point of note, to avoid confusion, is that the ZFS snapshot creation time isnot the same as the root directory creation timestamp. In ZFS, all object attributes in the original dataset are preserved when a snapshot is taken, including the creation time of the root directory.  Thus the root directory creation timestamp is the time that the directory was created in the original dataset. # ls -d% all /home/administrator         timestamp: atime         Mar 19 15:40:23 2009         timestamp: ctime         Mar 19 15:40:58 2009         timestamp: mtime         Mar 19 15:40:58 2009         timestamp: crtime         Mar 19 15:18:34 2009 # ls -d% all /home/administrator/.zfs/snapshot/snap101         timestamp: atime         Mar 19 15:40:23 2009         timestamp: ctime         Mar 19 15:40:58 2009         timestamp: mtime         Mar 19 15:40:58 2009         timestamp: crtime         Mar 19 15:18:34 2009 The snapshot creation time can be obtained using the zfs command as shown below. # zfs get all tank/home/administrator@snap101NAME                             PROPERTY  VALUEtank/home/administrator@snap101  type      snapshottank/home/administrator@snap101  creation  Mon Mar 23 18:21 2009 In this example, the dataset was created on March 19th and the snapshot was created on March 23rd. In conclusion, Shadow Copies for Shared Folders provides a straightforward way for users to view or recover files from ZFS snapshots.  The Windows desktop provides an easy to use, intuitive GUI and no configuration is required to use or access previous versions of files or folders. REFERENCES FOR MORE INFORMATION ZFS ZFS Learning Center Introduction to Shadow Copies of Shared Folders Shadow Copies for Shared Folders Client

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• Oracle RightNow CX for Good Customer Experiences

  - by Andreea Vaduva

  Oracle RightNow CX is all about the customer experience, it’s about understanding what drives a good interaction and it’s about delivering a solution which works for our customers and by extension, their customers. One of the early guiding principles of Oracle RightNow was an 8-point strategy to providing good customer experiences. Establish a knowledge foundation Empowering the customer Empower employees Offer multi-channel choice Listen to the customer Design seamless experiences Engage proactively Measure and improve continuously The application suite provides all of the tools necessary to deliver a rewarding, repeatable and measurable relationship between business and customer. The Knowledge Authoring tool provides gap analysis, WYSIWIG editing (and includes HTML rich content for non-developers), multi-level categorisation, permission based publishing and Web self-service publishing. Oracle RightNow Customer Portal, is a complete web application framework that enables businesses to control their own end-user page branding experience, which in turn will allow customers to self-serve. The Contact Centre Experience Designer builds a combination of workspaces, agent scripting and guided assistances into a Desktop Workflow. These present an agent with the tools they need, at the time they need them, providing even the newest and least experienced advisors with consistently accurate and efficient information, whilst guiding them through the complexities of internal business processes. Oracle RightNow provides access points for customers to feedback about specific knowledge articles or about the support site in general. The system will generate ‘incidents’ based on the scoring of the comments submitted. This makes it easy to view and respond to customer feedback. It is vital, more now than ever, not to under-estimate the power of the social web – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – they have the ability to cause untold amounts of damage to businesses with a single post – witness musician Dave Carroll and his protest song on YouTube, posted in response to poor customer services from an American airline. The first day saw 150,000 views and is currently at 12,011,375. The Times reported that within 4 days of the post, the airline’s stock price fell by 10 percent, which represented a cost to shareholders of $180 million dollars. It is a universally acknowledged fact, that when customers are unhappy, they will not come back, and, generally speaking, it only takes one bad experience to lose a customer. The idea that customer loyalty can be regained by using social media channels was the subject of a 2011 Survey commissioned by RightNow and conducted by Harris Interactive. The survey discovered that 68% of customers who posted a negative review about a holiday on a social networking site received a response from the business. It further found that 33% subsequently posted a positive review and 34% removed the original negative review. Cloud Monitor provides the perfect mechanism for seeing what is being said about a business on public Facebook pages, Twitter or YouTube posts; it allows agents to respond proactively – either by creating an Oracle RightNow incident or by using the same channel as the original post. This leaves step 8 – Measuring and Improving: How does a business know whether it’s doing the right thing? How does it know if its customers are happy? How does it know if its staff are being productive? How does it know if its staff are being effective? Cue Oracle RightNow Analytics – fully integrated across the entire platform – Service, Marketing and Sales – there are in excess of 800 standard reports. If this were not enough, a large proportion of the database has been made available via the administration console, allowing users without any prior database experience to write their own reports, format them and schedule them for e-mail delivery to a distribution list. It handles the complexities of table joins, and allows for the manipulation of data with ease. Oracle RightNow believes strongly in the customer owning their solution, and to provide the best foundation for success, Oracle University can give you the RightNow knowledge and skills you need. This is a selection of the courses offered: RightNow Customer Service Administration Rel 12.02 (3 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course familiarises users with the tasks and concepts needed to configure and maintain their system. RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course introduces basic CP structure and how to make changes to the look, feel and behaviour of their self-service pages RightNow Analytics Rel 12.02 (2 days) Available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand (Release 11.11 is available as In Class and Live Virtual Class) This course equips users with the skills necessary to understand data supplied by standard reports and to create custom reports RightNow Integration and Customization For Developers Rel 12.02 (5-days) Available as In Class and Live Virtual Class (Release 11.11 is available as In Class, Live Virtual Class and Training On Demand) This course is for experienced web developers and offers an introduction to Add-In development using the Desktop Add-In Framework and introduces the core knowledge that developers need to begin integrating Oracle RightNow CX with other systems A full list of courses offered can be found on the Oracle University website. For more information and course dates please get in contact with your local Oracle University team. On top of the Service components, the suite also provides marketing tools, complex survey creation and tracking and sales functionality. I’m a fan of the application, and I think I’ve made that clear: It’s completely geared up to providing customers with support at point of need. It can be configured to meet even the most stringent of business requirements. Oracle RightNow is passionate about, and committed to, providing the best customer experience possible. Oracle RightNow CX is the application that makes it possible. About the Author: Sarah Anderson worked for RightNow for 4 years in both in both a consulting and training delivery capacity. She is now a Senior Instructor with Oracle University, delivering the following Oracle RightNow courses: RightNow Customer Service Administration RightNow Analytics RightNow Customer Portal Designer and Contact Center Experience Designer Administration RightNow Marketing and Feedback

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• WebLogic JDBC Use of Oracle Wallet for SSL

  - by Steve Felts

  Introduction Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) can be used to secure the connection between the middle tier “client”, WebLogic Server (WLS) in this case, and the Oracle database server.  Data between WLS and database can be encrypted.  The server can be authenticated so you have proof that the database can be trusted by validating a certificate from the server.  The client can be authenticated so that the database only accepts connections from clients that it trusts. Similar to the discussion in an earlier article about using the Oracle wallet for database credentials, the Oracle wallet can also be used with SSL to store the keys and certificates.  By using it correctly, clear text passwords can be eliminated from the JDBC configuration and client/server configuration can be simplified by sharing the wallet across multiple datasources. There is a very good Oracle Technical White Paper on using SSL with the Oracle thin driver at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/wp-oracle-jdbc-thin-ssl-130128.pdf [LINK1].  The link http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/weblogic/index-087556.html [LINK2] describes how to use WebLogic Server with Oracle JDBC Driver SSL. The information in this article is a guide on what steps need to be taken in the variety of available options; use the links above for details. SSL from the driver to the database server is basically turned on by specifying a protocol of “tcps” in the URL.  However, there is a fair amount of setup needed.  Also remember that there is an overhead in performance. Creating the wallets The common use cases are 1. “data encryption and server-only authentication”, requiring just a trust store, or 2. “data encryption and authentication of both tiers” (client and server), requiring a trust store and a key store. It is recommended to use the auto-login wallet type so that clear text passwords are not needed in the datasource configuration to open the wallet.  The store type for an auto-login wallet is “SSO” (Single Sign On), not “JKS” or “PKCS12” as in [LINK2].  The file name is “cwallet.sso”. Wallets are created using the orapki tool.  They need to be created based on the usage (encryption and/or authentication).  This is discussed in detail in [LINK1] in Appendix B or in the Advanced Security Administrator’s Guide of the Database documentation. Database Server Configuration It is necessary to update the sqlnet.ora and listener.ora files with the directory location of the wallet using WALLET_LOCATION.  These files also indicate whether or not SSL_CLIENT_AUTHENTICATION is being used (true or false). The Oracle Listener must also be configured to use the TCPS protocol.  The recommended port is 2484. LISTENER = (ADDRESS_LIST= (ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=servername)(PORT=2484))) WebLogic Server Classpath The WebLogic Server CLASSPATH must have three additional security files. The files that need to be added to the WLS CLASSPATH are $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_cert_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.osdt_core_1.0.0.0.jar $MW_HOME/modules/com.oracle.oraclepki_1.0.0.0.jar One way to do this is to add them to PRE_CLASSPATH environment variable for use with the standard WebLogic scripts. Setting the Oracle Security Provider It’s necessary to enable the Oracle PKI provider on the client side.  This can either be done statically by updating the java.security file under the JRE or dynamically by setting it in a WLS startup class using java.security.Security.insertProviderAt(new oracle.security.pki.OraclePKIProvider (), 3); See the full example of the startup class in [LINK2]. Datasource Configuration When creating a WLS datasource, set the PROTOCOL in the URL to tcps as in the following. jdbc:oracle:thin:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcps)(HOST=host)(PORT=port))(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=myservice))) For encryption and server authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.trustStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.trustStoreType=”SSO” For client authentication, use the datasource connection properties: - javax.net.ssl.keyStore=location of wallet file on the client - javax.net.ssl.keyStoreType=”SSO” Note that the driver connection properties for the wallet require a file name, not a directory name. Active GridLink ONS over SSL For completeness, there is another SSL usage for WLS datasources.  The communication with the Oracle Notification Service (ONS) for load balancing information and node up/down events can use SSL also. Create an auto-login wallet and use the wallet on the client and server.  The following is a sample sequence to create a test wallet for use with ONS. orapki wallet create -wallet ons -auto_login -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet add -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -keysize 1024 -self_signed -validity 9999 -pwd ONS_Wallet orapki wallet export -wallet ons -dn "CN=ons_test,C=US" -cert ons/cert.txt -pwd ONS_Wallet On the database server side, it’s necessary to define the walletfile directory in the file $CRS_HOME/opmn/conf/ons.config and run onsctl stop/start. When configuring an Active GridLink datasource, the connection to the ONS must be defined.  In addition to the host and port, the wallet file directory must be specified.  By not giving a password, a SSO wallet is assumed. Summary To use SSL with the Oracle thin driver without any clear text passwords, use an SSO Oracle Wallet.  SSL support in the Oracle thin driver is available starting in 10g Release 2.

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• Partner Training on Endeca 2-Days Hands-on Fundamentals

  - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM

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• Changing the Game: Why Oracle is in the IT Operations Management Business

  - by DanKoloski

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Next week, in Orlando, is the annual Gartner IT Operations Management Summit. Oracle is a premier sponsor of this annual event, which brings together IT executives for several days of high level talks about the state of operational management of enterprise IT. This year, Sushil Kumar, VP Product Strategy and Business Development for Oracle’s Systems & Applications Management, will be presenting on the transformation in IT Operations required to support enterprise cloud computing. IT Operations transformation is an important subject, because year after year, we hear essentially the same refrain – large enterprises spend an average of two-thirds (67%!) of their IT resources (budget, energy, time, people, etc.) on running the business, with far too little left over to spend on growing and transforming the business (which is what the business actually needs and wants). In the thirtieth year of the distributed computing revolution (give or take, depending on how you count it), it’s amazing that we have still not moved the needle on the single biggest component of enterprise IT resource utilization. Oracle is in the IT Operations Management business because when management is engineered together with the technology under management, the resulting efficiency gains can be truly staggering. To put it simply – what if you could turn that 67% of IT resources spent on running the business into 50%? Or 40%? Imagine what you could do with those resources. It’s now not just possible, but happening. This seems like a simple idea, but it is a radical change from “business as usual” in enterprise IT Operations. For the last thirty years, management has been a bolted-on afterthought – we pick and deploy our technology, then figure out how to manage it. This pervasive dysfunction is a broken cycle that guarantees high ongoing operating costs and low agility. If we want to break the cycle, we need to take a more tightly-coupled approach. As a complete applications-to-disk platform provider, Oracle is engineering management together with technology across our stack and hooking that on-premise management up live to My Oracle Support. Let’s examine the results with just one piece of the Oracle stack – the Oracle Database. Oracle began this journey with the Oracle Database 9i many years ago with the introduction of low-impact instrumentation in the database kernel (“tell me what’s wrong”) and through Database 10g, 11g and 11gR2 has successively added integrated advisory (“tell me how to fix what’s wrong”) and lifecycle management and automated self-tuning (“fix it for me, and do it on an ongoing basis for all my assets”). When enterprises take advantage of this tight-coupling, the results are game-changing. Consider the following (for a full list of public references, visit this link): British Telecom improved database provisioning time 1000% (from weeks to minutes) which allows them to provide a new DBaaS service to their internal customers with no additional resources Cerner Corporation Saved $9.5 million in CapEx and OpEx AND launched a brand-new cloud business at the same time Vodafone Group plc improved response times 50% and reduced maintenance planning times 50-60% while serving 391 million registered mobile customers Or the recent Database Manageability and Productivity Cost Comparisons: Oracle Database 11g Release 2 vs. SAP Sybase ASE 15.7, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and IBM DB2 9.7 as conducted by independent analyst firm ORC. In later entries, we’ll discuss similar results across other portions of the Oracle stack and how these efficiency gains are required to achieve the agility benefits of Enterprise Cloud. Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Second Day of Data Integration Track at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Doug Reid

  0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Our second day at OpenWorld and the Data Integration Team was very active with customer meetings, product updates, product demonstrations, sessions, plus much more.  If the volume of traffic by our demo pods is any indicator, this is a record year for attendance at OpenWorld.  The DIS team have had tremendous number of people stop by our demo pods to learn about the latest product releases or to speak to one of our product managers.    For Oracle GoldenGate, there has been a great deal of interest in Integrated Capture and the  Oracle GoldenGate Monitor plug-in for Enterprise Manager.  Our customer panels this year have been very well attended and on Tuesday we held the “Real World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate Customer Panel”. On this panel this year we had Michael Wells from Raymond James, Joy Mathew and Venki Govindarajan from Comcast, and Serkan Karatas from Turk Telekom. Our panelists have a great mix of experiences and all are passionate about using Oracle Data Integration products to solve very complex use cases. Each panelist was given a ten minute to overview their use of our product, followed by a barrage of questions from the audience. Michael Wells spoke about using Oracle GoldenGate for heterogeneous real time replication from HP (Tandem) NonStop to SQL Server and emphasized the need for using standard naming conventions for when customers configure GoldenGate, as the practices is immensely helpful when debugging a problem. Joy Mathew and Venkat Govindarajan from Comcast described how they have used GoldenGate for over a decade and their experiences of using the product for replicating data from HP nonstop to Terdata. Serkan Karatas from Turk Telekom dove into using Oracle GoldenGate and the value of archiving data in extremely large databases, which in Turk Telekoms case resulted in a 1 month ROI for the entire project. Thanks again to our panelist and audience participants for making the session interactive and informative.  For Wednesday we have a number of sessions available to attendees plus two hands-on labs, which I have listed below.   If you are unable to attend our hands-on lab for Oracle GoldenGate Veridata, it is available online at youtube.com. Sessions  11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Best Practices for High Availability with Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Exadata -Moscone South - 102 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Customer Perspectives: Oracle Data Integrator -Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 Oracle GoldenGate Case Study: Real-Time Operational Reporting Deployment at Oracle -Moscone West - 2003 Data Preparation and Ongoing Governance with the Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Platform -Moscone West - 3000 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active -Moscone West - 3000 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Database -Moscone South - 102 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Hands-on Labs 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Introduction to Oracle GoldenGate Veridata Marriott Marquis - Salon 1/2 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle SOA Suite: Hands-on Lab -Marriott Marquis - Salon 1/2 If you are at OpenWorld please join us in these sessions. For a full review of data integration track at OpenWorld please see our Focus-On Document.

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• Sending Outlook Invites

  - by Daniel Moth

  Sending an Outlook invite for a meeting (also referred to as S+ in Microsoft) is a simple thing to get right if you just run the quick mental check below, which is driven by visual cues in the Outlook UI. I know that some folks don’t do this often or are new to Outlook, so if you know one of those folks share this blog post with them and if they read nothing else ask them to read step 7. Add on the To line the folks that you want to be at the meeting. Indicate optional invitees. Click on the “To” button to bring up the dialog that lets you move folks to be Optional (you can also do this from the Scheduling Assistant). Set the Reminder according to the attendee that has to travel the most. 5 minutes is the minimum. Use the Response Options and uncheck the "Request Response" if your event is going ahead regardless of who can make it or not, i.e. if everyone is optional. Don’t force every recipient to make an extra click, instead make the extra click yourself - you are the organizer. Add a good subject Make the subject such that just by reading it folks know what the meeting is about. Examples, e.g. "Review…", "Finalize…", "XYZ sync up" If this is only between two people and what is commonly referred to as a one to one, the subject would be something like "MyName/YourName 1:1" Write the subject in such a way that when the recipient sees this on their calendar among all the other items, they know what this meeting is about without having to see location, recipients, or any other information about the invite. Add a location, typically a meeting room. If recipients are from different buildings, schedule it where the folks that are doing the other folks a favor live. Otherwise schedule it wherever the least amount of people will have to travel. If you send me an invite to come to your building, and there is more of us than you, you are silently sending me the message that you are doing me a favor so if you don’t want to do that, include a note of why this is in your building, e.g. "Sorry we are slammed with back to back meetings today so hope you can come over to our building". If this is in someone's office, the location would be something like "Moth's office (7/666)" where in parenthesis you see the office location. If some folks are remote in another building/country, or if you know you picked a time which wasn't free for everyone, add an Online option (click the Lync Meeting button). Add a date and time. This MUST be at a time that is showing on the recipients’ calendar as FREE or at worst TENTATIVE. You can check that on the Scheduling Assistant. The reality is that this is not always possible, so in that case you MUST say something about it in the Invite Body, e.g. "Sorry I can see X has a conflict, but I cannot find a better slot", or "With so many of us there are some conflicts and I cannot find a better slot so hope this works", or "Apologies but due to Y we must have this meeting at this time and I know there are some conflicts, hope you can make it anyway". When you do that, I better not be able to find a better slot myself for all of us, and of course when you do that you have implicitly designated the Busy folks as optional. Finally, the body of the invite. This has the agenda of the meeting and if applicable the courtesy apologies due to messing up steps 6 & 7. This should not be the introduction to the meeting, in other words the recipients should not be surprised when they see the invite and go to the body to read it. Notifying them of the meeting takes place via separate email where you explain the purpose and give them a heads up that you'll be sending an invite. That separate email is also your chance to attach documents, don’t do that as part of the invite. TIP: If you have sent mail about the meeting, you can then go to your sent folder to select the message and click the "Meeting" button (Ctrl+Alt+R). This will populate the body with the necessary background, auto select the mandatory and optional attendees as per the TO/CC line, and have a subject that may be good enough already (or you can tweak it). Long to write, but very quick to remember and enforce since most of it is common sense and the checklist is driven of the visual cues in the UI you use to send the invite. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• XBRL - Moving from Production to Consumption

  - by jmorourke

  Here's an update on what’s new with XBRL and how it can actually benefit your organization versus adding extra time and costs to financial reporting.  On February 29th (leap day) of 2012 I attended the XBRL and Financial Analysis Technology Conference at Baruch College in NYC.  The event, which attracted over 300 XBRL gurus and fans was presented by XBRL US, The New York Society of Security Analysts’ Improved Corporate Reporting Committee, and Baruch College’s Robert Zicklin Center for Corporate Integrity.  The event featured keynotes from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the CFA Institute as well as panels covering alternative research tools and data, corporate reporting to stakeholders and a demonstration of XBRL analysis tools.  The program culminated in a presentation of the finalists and the winner of the $20,000 XBRL Challenge.    Some of the key points made in the sessions included: The focus of XBRL tools is moving from production to consumption. As of February 2012, over 9000 companies are reporting in XBRL, with over 10 million facts filed to date XBRL taxonomy extensions have dropped from 27% to 11% making comparisons easier The SEC reports that XBRL makes it easier to analyze disclosures, focus on accounting issues XBRL is helping standards-setters like the FASB speed their analysis of impacts of proposed accounting rule changes Companies like Thomson Reuters report that XBRL is helping speed the delivery of data to clients The most interesting part of the program though, was the session highlighting the 5 finalists in the XBRL Challenge competition and the winning solution.  The XBRL Challenge was launched in 2011 as a means of spurring the development of more end-user tools to help with the consumption of XBRL-based financial information.       Over an 8-month process handled by 5 judges, there were 84 registrants, 15 completed submissions, 5 finalists and one winner of the challenge.  All of the solutions are open-sourced tools and most of them focus on consuming XBRL-based data.  The 5 finalists included: Advanced XBRL Processing from Oxide solutions – XBRL viewer for taxonomies, filings and company data with peer comparison capabilities. Arrelle – API for XBRL processes, supports SEC Validations, RSS Feeds to access filings etc. Calcbench – XBRL data analysis tool that can be embedded in other web applications.  This tool can combine XBRL filings with real-time market data. XBRL to XL – allows the importing of XBRL data into Microsoft Excel for analysis, comparisons.  Users start on the web and populate Excel with XBRL data. XBurble – allows users to search and view XBRL filings, export to Excel, merge for comparison, and includes a workflow interface. The winner of the $20,000 XBRL Challenge prize was CalcBench.  More information about the XBRL Challenge and the finalists can be found at www.XBRLUS.org/challenge XBRL for Sustainability Reporting – other recent news on the XBRL front was the announcement by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) of an XBRL taxonomy for Sustainability Reporting.  This taxonomy was co-developed by the GRI and Deloitte and is designed to make the consumption of data found in Sustainability Reports much easier.  Although there is no government mandate to file Sustainability Reports in XBRL format, organizations that do use the GRI guidelines for Sustainability Reporting are encouraged to tag and submit their data voluntarily to the GRI – who will populate a database with Sustainability Reporting data and make this available to the public.  For more information about this initiative, you can go to the GRI web site:  www.globalreporting.org. So how does all of this benefit corporate filers and investors?  Since its introduction, the consensus in the market is that XBRL has mainly benefited the regulators and investment analysts who need to consume and analyze large volumes of financial data.  But with the emergence of more end-user tools for consuming and analyzing XBRL-based data, and the ability to perform quick comparisons of one company versus its peers and competitors in an industry group, will soon accelerate the benefits to corporate finance staff, as well as individual investors.  This could apply to financial results tagged in XBRL, as well as non-financial information such as Sustainability Reporting – which over the long-term will likely be integrated with financial reporting.   And as multiple regulators and agencies in a country adopt the XBRL standard for corporate filings, more benefits will accrue as companies will be able to leverage one set of XBRL-based financial data for multiple regulatory filings.     For more information about the latest developments in XBRL, check out the XBRL US or XBRL International web sites:  www.xbrl.org, www.xbrlus.org. For more information about what Oracle is doing to support XBRL, here are some links: http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/disclosure-management-065892.html http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/features/xmldb/index-087631.html Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need more information:  [email protected]

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• Agile Testing Days 2012 – My First Conference!

  - by Chris George

  I’d like to give you a bit of background first… so please bear with me! In 1996, whilst studying for my final year of my degree, I applied for a job as a C++ Developer at a small software house in Hertfordshire  After bodging up the technical part of the interview I didn’t get the job, but was offered a position as a QA Engineer instead. The role sounded intriguing and the pay was pretty good so in the absence of anything else I took it. Here began my career in the world of software testing! Back then, testing/QA was often an afterthought, something that was bolted on to the development process and very much a second class citizen. Test automation was rare, and tools were basic or non-existent! The internet was just starting to take off, and whilst there might have been testing communities and resources, we were certainly not exposed to any of them. After 8 years I moved to another small company, and again didn’t find myself exposed to any of the changes that were happening in the industry. It wasn’t until I joined Red Gate in 2008 that my view of testing and software development as a whole started to expand. But it took a further 4 years for my view of testing to be totally blown open, and so the story really begins… In May 2012 I was fortunate to land the role of Head of Test Engineering. Soon after, I received an email with details for the “Agile Testi However, in my new role, I decided that it was time to bite the bullet and at least go to one conference. Perhaps I could get some new ideas to supplement and support some of the ideas I already had.ng Days” conference in Potsdam, Germany. I looked over the suggested programme and some of the talks peeked my interest. For numerous reasons I’d shied away from attending conferences in the past, one of the main ones being that I didn’t see much benefit in attending loads of talks when I could just read about stuff like that on the internet. So, on the 18th November 2012, myself and three other Red Gaters boarded a plane at Heathrow bound for Potsdam, Germany to attend Agile Testing Days 2012. Tutorial Day – “Software Testing Reloaded” We chose to do the tutorials on the 19th, I chose the one titled “Software Testing Reloaded – So you wanna actually DO something? We’ve got just the workshop for you. Now with even less powerpoint!”. With such a concise and serious title I just had to see what it was about! I nervously entered the room to be greeted by tables, chairs etc all over the place, not set out and frankly in one hell of a mess! There were a few people in there playing a game with dice. Okaaaay… this is going to be a long day! Actually the dice game was an exercise in deduction and simplification… I found it very interesting and is certainly something I’ll be using at work as a training exercise! (I won’t explain the game here cause I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag…) The tutorial consisted of several games, exploring different aspects of testing. They were all practical yet required a fair amount of thin king. Matt Heusser and Pete Walen were running the tutorial, and presented it in a very relaxed and light-hearted manner. It was really my first experience of working in small teams with testers from very different backgrounds, and it was really enjoyable. Matt & Pete were very approachable and offered advice where required whilst still making you work for the answers! One of the tasks was to devise several strategies for testing some electronic dice. The premise was that a Vegas casino wanted to use the dice to appeal to the twenty-somethings interested in tech, but needed assurance that they were as reliable and random as traditional dice. This was a very interesting and challenging exercise that forced us to challenge various assumptions, determine/clarify requirements but most of all it was frustrating because the dice made a very very irritating beeping noise. Multiple that by at least 12 dice and I was dreaming about them all that night!! Some of the main takeaways that were brilliantly demonstrated through the games were not to make assumptions, challenge requirements, and have fun testing! The tutorial lasted the whole day, but to be honest the day went very quickly! My introduction into the conference experience started very well indeed, and I would talk to both Matt and Pete several times during the 4 days. Days 1,2 & 3 will be coming soon…  

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• The Enterprise is a Curmudgeon

  - by John K. Hines

  Working in an enterprise environment is a unique challenge.  There's a lot more to software development than developing software.  A project lead or Scrum Master has to manage personalities and intra-team politics, has to manage accomplishing the task at hand while creating the opportunities and a reputation for handling desirable future work, has to create a competent, happy team that actually delivers while being careful not to burn bridges or hurt feelings outside the team.  Which makes me feel surprised to read advice like: " The enterprise should figure out what is likely to work best for itself and try to use it." - Ken Schwaber, The Enterprise and Scrum. The enterprises I have experience with are fundamentally unable to be self-reflective.  It's like asking a Roman gladiator if he'd like to carve out a little space in the arena for some silent meditation.  I'm currently wondering how compatible Scrum is with the top-down hierarchy of life in a large organization.  Specifically, manufacturing-mindset, fixed-release, harmony-valuing large organizations.  Now I understand why Agile can be a better fit for companies without much organizational inertia. Recently I've talked with nearly two dozen software professionals and their managers about Scrum and Agile.  I've become convinced that a developer, team, organization, or enterprise can be Agile without using Scrum.  But I'm not sure about what process would be the best fit, in general, for an enterprise that wants to become Agile.  It's possible I should read more than just the introduction to Ken's book. I do feel prepared to answer some of the questions I had asked in a previous post: How can Agile practices (including but not limited to Scrum) be adopted in situations where the highest-placed managers in a company demand software within extremely aggressive deadlines? Answer: In a very limited capacity at the individual level.  The situation here is that the senior management of this company values any software release more than it values developer well-being, end-user experience, or software quality.  Only if the developing organization is given an immediate refactoring opportunity does this sort of development make sense to a person who values sustainable software.   How can Agile practices be adopted by teams that do not perform a continuous cycle of new development, such as those whose sole purpose is to reproduce and debug customer issues? Answer: It depends.  For Scrum in particular, I don't believe Scrum is meant to manage unpredictable work.  While you can easily adopt XP practices for bug fixing, the project-management aspects of Scrum require some predictability.  My question here was meant toward those who want to apply Scrum to non-development teams.  In some cases it works, in others it does not. How can a team measure if its development efforts are both Agile and employ sound engineering practices? Answer: I'm currently leaning toward measuring these independently.  The Agile Principles are a terrific way to measure if a software team is agile.  Sound engineering practices are those practices which help developers meet the principles.  I think Scrum is being mistakenly applied as an engineering practice when it is essentially a project management practice.  In my opinion, XP and Lean are examples of good engineering practices. How can Agile be explained in an accurate way that describes its benefits to sceptical developers and/or revenue-focused non-developers? Answer: Agile techniques will result in higher-quality, lower-cost software development.  This comes primarily from finding defects earlier in the development cycle.  If there are individual developers who do not want to collaborate, write unit tests, or refactor, then these are simply developers who are either working in an area where adding these techniques will not add value (i.e. they are an expert) or they are a developer who is satisfied with the status quo.  In the first case they should be left alone.  In the second case, the results of Agile should be demonstrated by other developers who are willing to receive recognition for their efforts.  It all comes down to individuals, doesn't it?  If you're working in an organization whose Agile adoption consists exclusively of Scrum, consider ways to form individual Agile teams to demonstrate its benefits.  These can even be virtual teams that span people across org-chart boundaries.  Once you can measure real value, whether it's Scrum, Lean, or something else, people will follow.  Even the curmudgeons.

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) is Available Now !

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2). It is now available for download on OTN on ALL platforms. This is the first major release since the launch of Enterprise Manager 12c in October of 2011. This is the first time when Enterprise Manager release is available on all platforms simultaneously. This is primarily a stability release which incorporates many of issues and feedback reported by early adopters. In addition, this release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board. New Capabilities and Features Enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds: Introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle Weblogic Server. The new capabilities include guided set up of PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out and metering and chargeback. Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server environments: Combining in-context multiple domain, patching and configuration file synchronizations. Integrated Hardware-Software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components. The latest management capabilities for business-critical applications include: Business Application Management: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application’s business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on. Enhanced User Experience Reporting: Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context. Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, bulk operations against many events, etc. New and Revised Plug-Ins: Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions. Revised plug-ins contain only bug-fixes and while new plug-ins incorporate both bug fixes as well as new functionality. Plug-In Name Version Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 (revision) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud 12.1.0.4 (new) Installation and Upgrade: All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) ) Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2. Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: User can do fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory). Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade. Documentation: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction Document provides a broad overview of capabilities and highlights"What's New" in EM 12.1.0.2. All updated Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation can be found on OTN Upgrade Guide Please feel free to ask questions related to the new Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) at the Oracle Enterprise Manager Forum . You could also share your feedback at twitter  using hash tag #em12c or at Facebook . Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• How to Implement Single Sign-On between Websites

  - by hmloo

  Introduction Single sign-on (SSO) is a way to control access to multiple related but independent systems, a user only needs to log in once and gains access to all other systems. a lot of commercial systems that provide Single sign-on solution and you can also choose some open source solutions like Opensso, CAS etc. both of them use centralized authentication and provide more robust authentication mechanism, but if each system has its own authentication mechanism, how do we provide a seamless transition between them. Here I will show you the case. How it Works The method we’ll use is based on a secret key shared between the sites. Origin site has a method to build up a hashed authentication token with some other parameters and redirect the user to the target site. variables Status Description ssoEncode required hash(ssoSharedSecret + , + ssoTime + , + ssoUserName) ssoTime required timestamp with format YYYYMMDDHHMMSS used to prevent playback attacks ssoUserName required unique username; required when a user is logged in Note : The variables will be sent via POST for security reasons Building a Single Sign-On Solution Origin Site has function to 1. Create the URL for your Request. 2. Generate required authentication parameters 3. Redirect to target site. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string postbackUrl = "http://www.targetsite.com/sso.aspx"; string ssoTime = DateTime.Now.ToString("yyyyMMddHHmmss"); string ssoUserName = User.Identity.Name; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string ssoHash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); string value = string.Format("{0}:{1},{2}", ssoHash,ssoTime, ssoUserName); Response.Clear(); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.Append("<html>"); sb.AppendFormat(@"<body onload='document.forms[""form""].submit()'>"); sb.AppendFormat("<form name='form' action='{0}' method='post'>", postbackUrl); sb.AppendFormat("<input type='hidden' name='t' value='{0}'>", value); sb.Append("</form>"); sb.Append("</body>"); sb.Append("</html>"); Response.Write(sb.ToString()); Response.End(); } } Target Site has function to 1. Get authentication parameters. 2. Validate the parameters with shared secret. 3. If the user is valid, then do authenticate and redirect to target page. 4. If the user is invalid, then show errors and return. using System; using System.Web.Security; using System.Text; public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { if (!IsPostBack) { if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) { Response.Redirect("~/Default.aspx"); } } if (Request.Params.Get("t") != null) { string ticket = Request.Params.Get("t"); char[] delimiters = new char[] { ':', ',' }; string[] ssoVariable = ticket.Split(delimiters, StringSplitOptions.None); string ssoHash = ssoVariable[0]; string ssoTime = ssoVariable[1]; string ssoUserName = ssoVariable[2]; DateTime appTime = DateTime.MinValue; int offsetTime = 60; // get this from config or similar try { appTime = DateTime.ParseExact(ssoTime, "yyyyMMddHHmmss", null); } catch { //show error return; } if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } bool isValid = false; string ssoSharedSecret = "58ag;ai76"; // get this from config or similar string hash = FormsAuthentication.HashPasswordForStoringInConfigFile(string.Format("{0},{1},{2}", ssoSharedSecret, ssoTime, ssoUserName), "md5"); if (string.Compare(ssoHash, hash, true) == 0) { if (Math.Abs(appTime.Subtract(DateTime.Now).TotalSeconds) > offsetTime) { //show error return; } else { isValid = true; } } if (isValid) { //Do authenticate; } else { //show error return; } } else { //show error } } } Summary This is a very simple and basic SSO solution, and its main advantage is its simplicity, only needs to add a single page to do SSO authentication, do not need to modify the existing system infrastructure.

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• Experience Oracle Enterprise Data Quality at OpenWorld 2012

  - by Mala Narasimharajan

  This year Enterprise Data Quality features sessions designed to cover topics above and beyond product strategy and roadmap. Specifically, we have planned to have sessions around data governance, how does EDQ enable data acquisition, migration as well as integration. In addition, check out our hands-on-lab to see for yourself the new enhancements and integration to EDQ. Finally, no OpenWorld is complete without fully exploring the DemoGrounds – come and learn how enterprise data quality is critical to enterprise success and fit-for-purpose data. SESSIONS Mon Oct 1   1:45 PM - 2:45 PM Oracle Enterprise Data Quality: Product Overview and Roadmap Moscone West – 3006 Wed Oct 3   1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Data Preparation and Ongoing Governance with the Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Platform                                                   Moscone West – 3000 Thurs – Oct 4   12:45 PM - 1:45 PM Data Acquisition, Migration, and Integration with the Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Platform                                                 Moscone West – 3005     HANDS ON LAB – Mon Oct 1   4:45 PM - 5:45 PM Introduction to Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Application                                                                                                                   Marriott Marquis - Salon ½ DEMO   Trusted Data with Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Moscone South, Right - S-243

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• ADF Reusable Artefacts

  - by Arda Eralp

  Primary reusable ADF Business Component: Entity Objects (EOs) View Objects (VOs) Application Modules (AMs) Framework Extensions Classes Primary reusable ADF Controller: Bounded Task Flows (BTFs) Task Flow Templates Primary reusable ADF Faces: Page Templates Skins Declarative Components Utility Classes Certain components will often be used more than once. Whether the reuse happens within the same application, or across different applications, it is often advantageous to package these reusable components into a library that can be shared between different developers, across different teams, and even across departments within an organization. In the world of Java object-oriented programming, reusing classes and objects is just standard procedure. With the introduction of the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, applications can be further modularized into separate model, view, and controller layers. By separating the data (model and business services layers) from the presentation (view and controller layers), you ensure that changes to any one layer do not affect the integrity of the other layers. You can change business logic without having to change the UI, or redesign the web pages or front end without having to recode domain logic. Oracle ADF and JDeveloper support the MVC design pattern. When you create an application in JDeveloper, you can choose many application templates that automatically set up data model and user interface projects. Because the different MVC layers are decoupled from each other, development can proceed on different projects in parallel and with a certain amount of independence. ADF Library further extends this modularity of design by providing a convenient and practical way to create, deploy, and reuse high-level components. When you first design your application, you design it with component reusability in mind. If you created components that can be reused, you can package them into JAR files and add them to a reusable component repository. If you need a component, you may look into the repository for those components and then add them into your project or application. For example, you can create an application module for a domain and package it to be used as the data model project in several different applications. Or, if your application will be consuming components, you may be able to load a page template component from a repository of ADF Library JARs to create common look and feel pages. Then you can put your page flow together by stringing together several task flow components pulled from the library. An ADF Library JAR contains ADF components and does not, and cannot, contain other JARs. It should not be confused with the JDeveloper library, Java EE library, or Oracle WebLogic shared library. Reusable Component Description Data Control Any data control can be packaged into an ADF Library JAR. Some of the data controls supported by Oracle ADF include application modules, Enterprise JavaBeans, web services, URL services, JavaBeans, and placeholder data controls. Application Module When you are using ADF Business Components and you generate an application module, an associated application module data control is also generated. When you package an application module data control, you also package up the ADF Business Components associated with that application module. The relevant entity objects, view objects, and associations will be a part of the ADF Library JAR and available for reuse. Business Components Business components are the entity objects, view objects, and associations used in the ADF Business Components data model project. You can package business components by themselves or together with an application module. Task Flows & Task Flow Templates Task flows can be packaged into an ADF Library JAR for reuse. If you drop a bounded task flow that uses page fragments, JDeveloper adds a region to the page and binds it to the dropped task flow. ADF bounded task flows built using pages can be dropped onto pages. The drop will create a link to call the bounded task flow. A task flow call activity and control flow will automatically be added to the task flow, with the view activity referencing the page. If there is more than one existing task flow with a view activity referencing the page, it will prompt you to select the one to automatically add a task flow call activity and control flow. If an ADF task flow template was created in the same project as the task flow, the ADF task flow template will be included in the ADF Library JAR and will be reusable. Page Templates You can package a page template and its artifacts into an ADF Library JAR. If the template uses image files and they are included in a directory within your project, these files will also be available for the template during reuse. Declarative Components You can create declarative components and package them for reuse. The tag libraries associated with the component will be included and loaded into the consuming project. You can also package up projects that have several different reusable components if you expect that more than one component will be consumed. For example, you can create a project that has both an application module and a bounded task flow. When this ADF Library JAR file is consumed, the application will have both the application module and the task flow available for use. You can package multiple components into one JAR file, or you can package a single component into a JAR file. Oracle ADF and JDeveloper give you the option and flexibility to create reusable components that best suit you and your organization. You create a reusable component by using JDeveloper to package and deploy the project that contains the components into a ADF Library JAR file. You use the components by adding that JAR to the consuming project. At design time, the JAR is added to the consuming project's class path and so is available for reuse. At runtime, the reused component runs from the JAR file by reference.

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• Application Composer: Exposing Your Customizations in BI Analytics and Reporting

  - by Richard Bingham

  Introduction This article explains in simple terms how to ensure the customizations and extensions you have made to your Fusion Applications are available for use in reporting and analytics. It also includes four embedded demo videos from our YouTube channel (if they don't appear check the browser address bar for a blocking shield icon). If you are new to Business Intelligence consider first reviewing our getting started article, and you can read more about the topic of custom subject areas in the documentation book Extending Sales. There are essentially four sections to this post. First we look at how custom fields added to standard objects are made available for reporting. Secondly we look at creating custom subject areas on the standard objects. Next we consider reporting on custom objects, starting with simple standalone objects, then child custom objects, and finally custom objects with relationships. Finally this article reviews how flexfields are exposed for reporting. Whilst this article applies to both Cloud/SaaS and on-premises deployments, if you are an on-premises developer then you can also use the BI Administration Tool to customize your BI metadata repository (the RPD) and create new subject areas. Whilst this is not covered here you can read more in Chapter 8 of the Extensibility Guide for Developers. Custom Fields on Standard Objects If you add a custom field to your standard object then it's likely you'll want to include it in your reports. This is very simple, since all new fields are instantly available in the "[objectName] Extension" folder in existing subject areas. The following two minute video demonstrates this. Custom Subject Areas for Standard Objects You can create your own subject areas for use in analytics and reporting via Application Composer. An example use-case could be to simplify the seeded subject areas, since they sometimes contain complex data fields and internal values that could confuse business users. One thing to note is that you cannot create subject areas in a sandbox, as it is not supported by BI, so once your custom object is tested and complete you'll need to publish the sandbox before moving forwards. The subject area creation processes is essentially two-fold. Once the request is submitted the ADF artifacts are generated, then secondly the related metadata is sent to the BI presentation server API's to make the updates there. One thing to note is that this second step may take up to ten minutes to complete. Once finished the status of the custom subject area request should show as 'OK' and it is then ready for use. Within the creation processes wizard-like steps there are three concepts worth highlighting: Date Flattening - this feature permits the roll up of reports at various date levels, such as data by week, month, quarter, or year. You simply check the box to enable it for that date field. Measures - these are your own functions that you can build into the custom subject area. They are related to the field data type and include min-max for dates, and sum(), avg(), and count() for  numeric fields. Implicit Facts - used to make the BI metadata join between your object fields and the calculated measure fields. The advice is to choose the most frequently used measure to ensure consistency. This video shows a simple example, where a simplified subject area is created for the customer 'Contact' standard object, picking just a few fields upon which users can then create reports. Custom Objects Custom subject areas support three types of custom objects. First is a simple standalone custom object and for which the same process mentioned above applies. The next is a custom child object created on a standard object parent, and finally a custom object that is related to a parent object - usually through a dynamic choice list. Whilst the steps in each of these last two are mostly the same, there are differences in the way you choose the objects and their fields. This is illustrated in the videos below.The first video shows the process for creating a custom subject area for a simple standalone custom object. This second video demonstrates how to create custom subject areas for custom objects that are of parent:child type, as well as those those with dynamic-choice-list relationships. &lt;span id=&quot;XinhaEditingPostion&quot;&gt;&lt;/span&gt; Flexfields Dynamic and Extensible Flexfields satisfy a similar requirement as custom fields (for Application Composer), with flexfields common across the Fusion Financials, Supply Chain and Procurement, and HCM applications. The basic principle is when you enable and configure your flexfields, in the edit page under each segment region (for both global and context segments) there is a BI Enabled check box. Once this is checked and you've completed your configuration, you run the Scheduled Process job named 'Import Oracle Fusion Data Extensions for Transactional Business Intelligence' to generate and migrate the related BI artifacts and data. This applies for dynamic, key, and extensible flexfields. Of course there is more to consider in terms of how you wish your flexfields to be implemented and exposed in your reports, and details are given in Chapter 4 of the Extending Applications guide.

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• Implementing a Custom Coherence PartitionAssignmentStrategy

  - by jpurdy

  A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. Traditionally, Coherence used a distributed algorithm spread across the cache servers (and as of Coherence 3.7, this is still the default implementation). With the introduction of the PAS interface, the model of operation was changed so that the logic would run solely in the cache service senior member. Obviously, this makes the development of a custom PAS vastly less complex, and in practice does not introduce a significant single point of failure/bottleneck. Note that Coherence ships with a default PAS implementation but it is not used by default. Further, custom PAS implementations are uncommon (this engagement was the first custom implementation that we know of). The particular implementation mentioned above also faced challenges related to managing multiple backup copies but that won't be discussed here. There were a few challenges that arose during design and implementation: Naive algorithms had an unreasonable upper bound of computational cost. There was significant complexity associated with configurations where the member count varied significantly between physical machines. Most of the complexity of a PAS is related to rebalancing, not initial assignment (which is usually fairly simple). A custom PAS may need to solve several problems simultaneously, such as: Ensuring that each member has a similar number of primary and backup partitions (e.g. each member has the same number of primary and backup partitions) Ensuring that each member carries similar responsibility (e.g. the most heavily loaded member has no more than one partition more than the least loaded). Ensuring that each partition is on the same member as a corresponding local resource (e.g. for applications that use partitioning across message queues, to ensure that each partition is collocated with its corresponding message queue). Ensuring that a given member holds no more than a given number of partitions (e.g. no member has more than 10 partitions) Ensuring that backups are placed far enough away from the primaries (e.g. on a different physical machine or a different blade enclosure) Achieving the above goals while ensuring that partition movement is minimized. These objectives can be even more complicated when the topology of the cluster is irregular. For example, if multiple cluster members may exist on each physical machine, then clearly the possibility exists that at certain points (e.g. following a member failure), the number of members on each machine may vary, in certain cases significantly so. Consider the case where there are three physical machines, with 3, 3 and 9 members each (respectively). This introduces complexity since the backups for the 9 members on the the largest machine must be spread across the other 6 members (to ensure placement on different physical machines), preventing an even distribution. For any given problem like this, there are usually reasonable compromises available, but the key point is that objectives may conflict under extreme (but not at all unlikely) circumstances. The most obvious general purpose partition assignment algorithm (possibly the only general purpose one) is to define a scoring function for a given mapping of partitions to members, and then apply that function to each possible permutation, selecting the most optimal permutation. This would result in N! (factorial) evaluations of the scoring function. This is clearly impractical for all but the smallest values of N (e.g. a partition count in the single digits). It's difficult to prove that more efficient general purpose algorithms don't exist, but the key take away from this is that algorithms will tend to either have exorbitant worst case performance or may fail to find optimal solutions (or both) -- it is very important to be able to show that worst case performance is acceptable. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the problem must be further constrained, perhaps by limiting functionality or by using domain-specific optimizations. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to design these more focused algorithms. In the specific case mentioned, we constrained the solution space to very small clusters (in terms of machine count) with small partition counts and supported exactly two backup copies, and accepted the fact that partition movement could potentially be significant (preferring to solve that issue through brute force). We then used the out-of-the-box PAS implementation as a fallback, delegating to it for configurations that were not supported by our algorithm. Our experience was that the PAS interface is quite usable, but there are intrinsic challenges to designing PAS implementations that should be very carefully evaluated before committing to that approach.

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• Data Source Security Part 1

  - by Steve Felts

  I’ve written a couple of articles on how to store data source security credentials using the Oracle wallet.  I plan to write a few articles on the various types of security available to WebLogic Server (WLS) data sources.  There are more options than you might think! There have been several enhancements in this area in WLS 10.3.6.  There are a couple of more enhancements planned for release WLS 12.1.2 that I will include here for completeness.  This isn’t intended as a teaser.  If you call your Oracle support person, you can get them now as minor patches to WLS 10.3.6.   The current security documentation is scattered in a few places, has a few incorrect statements, and is missing a few topics.  It also seems that the knowledge of how to apply some of these features isn’t written down.  The goal of these articles is to talk about WLS data source security in a unified way and to introduce some approaches to using the available features.  Introduction to WebLogic Data Source Security Options By default, you define a single database user and password for a data source.  You can store it in the data source descriptor or make use of the Oracle wallet.  This is a very simple and efficient approach to security.  All of the connections in the connection pool are owned by this user and there is no special processing when a connection is given out.  That is, it’s a homogeneous connection pool and any request can get any connection from a security perspective (there are other aspects like affinity).  Regardless of the end user of the application, all connections in the pool use the same security credentials to access the DBMS.   No additional information is needed when you get a connection because it’s all available from the data source descriptor (or wallet). java.sql.Connection conn =  mydatasource.getConnection(); Note: You can enter the password as a name-value pair in the Properties field (this not permitted for production environments) or you can enter it in the Password field of the data source descriptor. The value in the Password field overrides any password value defined in the Properties passed to the JDBC Driver when creating physical database connections. It is recommended that you use the Password attribute in place of the password property in the properties string because the Password value is encrypted in the configuration file (stored as the password-encrypted attribute in the jdbc-driver-params tag in the module file) and is hidden in the administration console.  The Properties and Password fields are located on the administration console Data Source creation wizard or Data Source Configuration tab. The JDBC API can also be used to programmatically specify a database user name and password as in the following.  java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(“user”, “password”); According to the JDBC specification, it’s supposed to take a database user and associated password but different vendors implement this differently.  WLS, by default, treats this as an application server user and password.  The pair is authenticated to see if it’s a valid user and that user is used for WLS security permission checks.  By default, the user is then mapped to a database user and password using the data source credential mapper, so this API sort of follows the specification but database credentials are one-step removed from the application code.  More details and the rationale are described later. While the default approach is simple, it does mean that only one database user is doing all of the work.  You can’t figure out who actually did the update and you can’t restrict SQL operations by who is running the operation, at least at the database level.   Any type of per-user logic will need to be in the application code instead of having the database do it.  There are various WLS data source features that can be configured to provide some per-user information about the operations to the database. WebLogic Data Source Security Options This table describes the features available for WebLogic data sources to configure database security credentials and a brief description.  It also captures information about the compatibility of these features with one another. Feature Description Can be used with Can’t be used with User authentication (default) Default getConnection(user, password) behavior – validate the input and use the user/password in the descriptor. Set client identifier Proxy Session, Identity pooling, Use database credentials Use database credentials Instead of using the credential mapper, use the supplied user and password directly. Set client identifier, Proxy session, Identity pooling User authentication, Multi Data Source Set Client Identifier Set a client identifier property associated with the connection (Oracle and DB2 only). Everything Proxy Session Set a light-weight proxy user associated with the connection (Oracle-only). Set client identifier, Use database credentials Identity pooling, User authentication Identity pooling Heterogeneous pool of connections owned by specified users. Set client identifier, Use database credentials Proxy session, User authentication, Labeling, Multi-datasource, Active GridLink Note that all of these features are available with both XA and non-XA drivers. Currently, the Proxy Session and Use Database Credentials options are on the Oracle tab of the Data Source Configuration tab of the administration console (even though the Use Database Credentials feature is not just for Oracle databases – oops).  The rest of the features are on the Identity tab of the Data Source Configuration tab in the administration console (plan on seeing them all in one place in the future). The subsequent articles will describe these features in more detail.  Keep referring back to this table to see the big picture.

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