Search Results

Search found 17249 results on 690 pages for 'resource management'.

Page 610/690 | < Previous Page | 606 607 608 609 610 611 612 613 614 615 616 617  | Next Page >

  • Big Data – Various Learning Resources – How to Start with Big Data? – Day 20 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned how to become a Data Scientist for Big Data. In this article we will go over various learning resources related to Big Data. In this series we have covered many of the most essential details about Big Data. At the beginning of this series, I have encouraged readers to send me questions. One of the most popular questions is - “I want to learn more about Big Data. Where can I learn it?” This is indeed a great question as there are plenty of resources out to learn about Big Data and it is indeed difficult to select on one resource to learn Big Data. Hence I decided to write here a few of the very important resources which are related to Big Data. Learn from Pluralsight Pluralsight is a global leader in high-quality online training for hardcore developers.  It has fantastic Big Data Courses and I started to learn about Big Data with the help of Pluralsight. Here are few of the courses which are directly related to Big Data. Big Data: The Big Picture Big Data Analytics with Tableau NoSQL: The Big Picture Understanding NoSQL Data Analysis Fundamentals with Tableau I encourage all of you start with this video course as they are fantastic fundamentals to learn Big Data. Learn from Apache Resources at Apache are single point the most authentic learning resources. If you want to learn fundamentals and go deep about every aspect of the Big Data, I believe you must understand various concepts in Apache’s library. I am pretty impressed with the documentation and I am personally referencing it every single day when I work with Big Data. I strongly encourage all of you to bookmark following all the links for authentic big data learning. Haddop - The Apache Hadoop® project develops open-source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. Ambari: A web-based tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache Hadoop clusters which include support for Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hive, HCatalog, HBase, ZooKeeper, Oozie, Pig and Sqoop. Ambari also provides a dashboard for viewing cluster health such as heat maps and ability to view MapReduce, Pig and Hive applications visually along with features to diagnose their performance characteristics in a user-friendly manner. Avro: A data serialization system. Cassandra: A scalable multi-master database with no single points of failure. Chukwa: A data collection system for managing large distributed systems. HBase: A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage for large tables. Hive: A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad hoc querying. Mahout: A Scalable machine learning and data mining library. Pig: A high-level data-flow language and execution framework for parallel computation. ZooKeeper: A high-performance coordination service for distributed applications. Learn from Vendors One of the biggest issues with about learning Big Data is setting up the environment. Every Big Data vendor has different environment request and there are lots of things require to set up Big Data framework. Many of the users do not start with Big Data as they are afraid about the resources required to set up framework as well as a time commitment. Here Hortonworks have created fantastic learning environment. They have created Sandbox with everything one person needs to learn Big Data and also have provided excellent tutoring along with it. Sandbox comes with a dozen hands-on tutorial that will guide you through the basics of Hadoop as well it contains the Hortonworks Data Platform. I think Hortonworks did a fantastic job building this Sandbox and Tutorial. Though there are plenty of different Big Data Vendors I have decided to list only Hortonworks due to their unique setup. Please leave a comment if there are any other such platform to learn Big Data. I will include them over here as well. Learn from Books There are indeed few good books out there which one can refer to learn Big Data. Here are few good books which I have read. I will update the list as I will learn more. Ethics of Big Data Balancing Risk and Innovation Big Data for Dummies Head First Data Analysis: A Learner’s Guide to Big Numbers, Statistics, and Good Decisions If you search on Amazon there are millions of the books but I think above three books are a great set of books and it will give you great ideas about Big Data. Once you go through above books, you will have a clear idea about what is the next step you should follow in this series. You will be capable enough to make the right decision for yourself. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will wrap up this series of Big Data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

    Read the article

  • Driver error when using multiple shaders

    - by Jinxi
    I'm using 3 different shaders: a tessellation shader to use the tessellation feature of DirectX11 :) a regular shader to show how it would look without tessellation and a text shader to display debug-info such as FPS, model count etc. All of these shaders are initialized at the beginning. Using the keyboard, I can switch between the tessellation shader and regular shader to render the scene. Additionally, I also want to be able toggle the display of debug-info using the text shader. Since implementing the tessellation shader the text shader doesn't work anymore. When I activate the DebugText (rendered using the text-shader) my screens go black for a while, and Windows displays the following message: Display Driver stopped responding and has recovered This happens with either of the two shaders used to render the scene. Additionally: I can start the application using the regular shader to render the scene and then switch to the tessellation shader. If I try to switch back to the regular shader I get the same error as with the text shader. What am I doing wrong when switching between shaders? What am I doing wrong when displaying text at the same time? What file can I post to help you help me? :) thx P.S. I already checked if my keyinputs interrupt at the wrong time (during render or so..), but that seems to be ok Testing Procedure Regular Shader without text shader Add text shader to Regular Shader by keyinput (works now, I built the text shader back to only vertex and pixel shader) (somthing with the z buffer is stil wrong...) Remove text shader, then change shader to Tessellation Shader by key input Then if I add the Text Shader or switch back to the Regular Shader Switching/Render Shader Here the code snipet from the Renderer.cpp where I choose the Shader according to the boolean "m_useTessellationShader": if(m_useTessellationShader) { // Render the model using the tesselation shader ecResult = m_ShaderManager->renderTessellationShader(m_D3D->getDeviceContext(), meshes[lod_level]->getIndexCount(), worldMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix, textures, texturecount, m_Light->getDirection(), m_Light->getAmbientColor(), m_Light->getDiffuseColor(), (D3DXVECTOR3)m_Camera->getPosition(), TESSELLATION_AMOUNT); } else { // todo: loaded model depends on distance to camera // Render the model using the light shader. ecResult = m_ShaderManager->renderShader(m_D3D->getDeviceContext(), meshes[lod_level]->getIndexCount(), lod_level, textures, texturecount, m_Light->getDirection(), m_Light->getAmbientColor(), m_Light->getDiffuseColor(), worldMatrix, viewMatrix, projectionMatrix); } And here the code snipet from the Mesh.cpp where I choose the Typology according to the boolean "useTessellationShader": // RenderBuffers is called from the Render function. The purpose of this function is to set the vertex buffer and index buffer as active on the input assembler in the GPU. Once the GPU has an active vertex buffer it can then use the shader to render that buffer. void Mesh::renderBuffers(ID3D11DeviceContext* deviceContext, bool useTessellationShader) { unsigned int stride; unsigned int offset; // Set vertex buffer stride and offset. stride = sizeof(VertexType); offset = 0; // Set the vertex buffer to active in the input assembler so it can be rendered. deviceContext->IASetVertexBuffers(0, 1, &m_vertexBuffer, &stride, &offset); // Set the index buffer to active in the input assembler so it can be rendered. deviceContext->IASetIndexBuffer(m_indexBuffer, DXGI_FORMAT_R32_UINT, 0); // Check which Shader is used to set the appropriate Topology // Set the type of primitive that should be rendered from this vertex buffer, in this case triangles. if(useTessellationShader) { deviceContext->IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_3_CONTROL_POINT_PATCHLIST); }else{ deviceContext->IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLELIST); } return; } RenderShader Could there be a problem using sometimes only vertex and pixel shader and after switching using vertex, hull, domain and pixel shader? Here a little overview of my architecture: TextClass: uses font.vs and font.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); RegularShader: uses vertex.vs and pixel.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); TessellationShader: uses tessellation.vs, tessellation.hs, tessellation.ds, tessellation.ps deviceContext-VSSetShader(m_vertexShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-HSSetShader(m_hullShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-DSSetShader(m_domainShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetShader(m_pixelShader, NULL, 0); deviceContext-PSSetSamplers(0, 1, &m_sampleState); ClearState I'd like to switch between 2 shaders and it seems they have different context parameters, right? In clearstate methode it says it resets following params to NULL: I found following in my Direct3D Class: depth-stencil state - m_deviceContext-OMSetDepthStencilState rasterizer state - m_deviceContext-RSSetState(m_rasterState); blend state - m_device-CreateBlendState viewports - m_deviceContext-RSSetViewports(1, &viewport); I found following in every Shader Class: input/output resource slots - deviceContext-PSSetShaderResources shaders - deviceContext-VSSetShader to - deviceContext-PSSetShader input layouts - device-CreateInputLayout sampler state - device-CreateSamplerState These two I didn't understand, where can I find them? predications - ? scissor rectangles - ? Do I need to store them all localy so I can switch between them, because it doesn't feel right to reinitialize the Direct3d and the Shaders by every switch (key input)?!

    Read the article

  • web.xml not reloading in tomcat even after stop/start

    - by ajay
    This is in relation to:- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2576514/basic-tomcat-servlet-error I changed my web.xml file, did ant compile , all, /etc/init.d/tomcat stop , start Even then my web.xml file in tomcat deployment is still unchanged. This is build.properties file:- app.name=hello catalina.home=/usr/local/tomcat manager.username=admin manager.password=admin This is my build.xml file. Is there something wrong with this:- <!-- Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License. --> <!-- General purpose build script for web applications and web services, including enhanced support for deploying directly to a Tomcat 6 based server. This build script assumes that the source code of your web application is organized into the following subdirectories underneath the source code directory from which you execute the build script: docs Static documentation files to be copied to the "docs" subdirectory of your distribution. src Java source code (and associated resource files) to be compiled to the "WEB-INF/classes" subdirectory of your web applicaiton. web Static HTML, JSP, and other content (such as image files), including the WEB-INF subdirectory and its configuration file contents. $Id: build.xml.txt 562814 2007-08-05 03:52:04Z markt $ --> <!-- A "project" describes a set of targets that may be requested when Ant is executed. The "default" attribute defines the target which is executed if no specific target is requested, and the "basedir" attribute defines the current working directory from which Ant executes the requested task. This is normally set to the current working directory. --> <project name="My Project" default="compile" basedir="."> <!-- ===================== Property Definitions =========================== --> <!-- Each of the following properties are used in the build script. Values for these properties are set by the first place they are defined, from the following list: * Definitions on the "ant" command line (ant -Dfoo=bar compile). * Definitions from a "build.properties" file in the top level source directory of this application. * Definitions from a "build.properties" file in the developer's home directory. * Default definitions in this build.xml file. You will note below that property values can be composed based on the contents of previously defined properties. This is a powerful technique that helps you minimize the number of changes required when your development environment is modified. Note that property composition is allowed within "build.properties" files as well as in the "build.xml" script. --> <property file="build.properties"/> <property file="${user.home}/build.properties"/> <!-- ==================== File and Directory Names ======================== --> <!-- These properties generally define file and directory names (or paths) that affect where the build process stores its outputs. app.name Base name of this application, used to construct filenames and directories. Defaults to "myapp". app.path Context path to which this application should be deployed (defaults to "/" plus the value of the "app.name" property). app.version Version number of this iteration of the application. build.home The directory into which the "prepare" and "compile" targets will generate their output. Defaults to "build". catalina.home The directory in which you have installed a binary distribution of Tomcat 6. This will be used by the "deploy" target. dist.home The name of the base directory in which distribution files are created. Defaults to "dist". manager.password The login password of a user that is assigned the "manager" role (so that he or she can execute commands via the "/manager" web application) manager.url The URL of the "/manager" web application on the Tomcat installation to which we will deploy web applications and web services. manager.username The login username of a user that is assigned the "manager" role (so that he or she can execute commands via the "/manager" web application) --> <property name="app.name" value="myapp"/> <property name="app.path" value="/${app.name}"/> <property name="app.version" value="0.1-dev"/> <property name="build.home" value="${basedir}/build"/> <property name="catalina.home" value="../../../.."/> <!-- UPDATE THIS! --> <property name="dist.home" value="${basedir}/dist"/> <property name="docs.home" value="${basedir}/docs"/> <property name="manager.url" value="http://localhost:8080/manager"/> <property name="src.home" value="${basedir}/src"/> <property name="web.home" value="${basedir}/web"/> <!-- ==================== External Dependencies =========================== --> <!-- Use property values to define the locations of external JAR files on which your application will depend. In general, these values will be used for two purposes: * Inclusion on the classpath that is passed to the Javac compiler * Being copied into the "/WEB-INF/lib" directory during execution of the "deploy" target. Because we will automatically include all of the Java classes that Tomcat 6 exposes to web applications, we will not need to explicitly list any of those dependencies. You only need to worry about external dependencies for JAR files that you are going to include inside your "/WEB-INF/lib" directory. --> <!-- Dummy external dependency --> <!-- <property name="foo.jar" value="/path/to/foo.jar"/> --> <!-- ==================== Compilation Classpath =========================== --> <!-- Rather than relying on the CLASSPATH environment variable, Ant includes features that makes it easy to dynamically construct the classpath you need for each compilation. The example below constructs the compile classpath to include the servlet.jar file, as well as the other components that Tomcat makes available to web applications automatically, plus anything that you explicitly added. --> <path id="compile.classpath"> <!-- Include all JAR files that will be included in /WEB-INF/lib --> <!-- *** CUSTOMIZE HERE AS REQUIRED BY YOUR APPLICATION *** --> <!-- <pathelement location="${foo.jar}"/> --> <!-- Include all elements that Tomcat exposes to applications --> <fileset dir="${catalina.home}/bin"> <include name="*.jar"/> </fileset> <pathelement location="${catalina.home}/lib"/> <fileset dir="${catalina.home}/lib"> <include name="*.jar"/> </fileset> </path> <!-- ================== Custom Ant Task Definitions ======================= --> <!-- These properties define custom tasks for the Ant build tool that interact with the "/manager" web application installed with Tomcat 6. Before they can be successfully utilized, you must perform the following steps: - Copy the file "lib/catalina-ant.jar" from your Tomcat 6 installation into the "lib" directory of your Ant installation. - Create a "build.properties" file in your application's top-level source directory (or your user login home directory) that defines appropriate values for the "manager.password", "manager.url", and "manager.username" properties described above. For more information about the Manager web application, and the functionality of these tasks, see <http://localhost:8080/tomcat-docs/manager-howto.html>. --> <taskdef resource="org/apache/catalina/ant/catalina.tasks" classpathref="compile.classpath"/> <!-- ==================== Compilation Control Options ==================== --> <!-- These properties control option settings on the Javac compiler when it is invoked using the <javac> task. compile.debug Should compilation include the debug option? compile.deprecation Should compilation include the deprecation option? compile.optimize Should compilation include the optimize option? --> <property name="compile.debug" value="true"/> <property name="compile.deprecation" value="false"/> <property name="compile.optimize" value="true"/> <!-- ==================== All Target ====================================== --> <!-- The "all" target is a shortcut for running the "clean" target followed by the "compile" target, to force a complete recompile. --> <target name="all" depends="clean,compile" description="Clean build and dist directories, then compile"/> <!-- ==================== Clean Target ==================================== --> <!-- The "clean" target deletes any previous "build" and "dist" directory, so that you can be ensured the application can be built from scratch. --> <target name="clean" description="Delete old build and dist directories"> <delete dir="${build.home}"/> <delete dir="${dist.home}"/> </target> <!-- ==================== Compile Target ================================== --> <!-- The "compile" target transforms source files (from your "src" directory) into object files in the appropriate location in the build directory. This example assumes that you will be including your classes in an unpacked directory hierarchy under "/WEB-INF/classes". --> <target name="compile" depends="prepare" description="Compile Java sources"> <!-- Compile Java classes as necessary --> <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes"/> <javac srcdir="${src.home}" destdir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes" debug="${compile.debug}" deprecation="${compile.deprecation}" optimize="${compile.optimize}"> <classpath refid="compile.classpath"/> </javac> <!-- Copy application resources --> <copy todir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes"> <fileset dir="${src.home}" excludes="**/*.java"/> </copy> </target> <!-- ==================== Dist Target ===================================== --> <!-- The "dist" target creates a binary distribution of your application in a directory structure ready to be archived in a tar.gz or zip file. Note that this target depends on two others: * "compile" so that the entire web application (including external dependencies) will have been assembled * "javadoc" so that the application Javadocs will have been created --> <target name="dist" depends="compile,javadoc" description="Create binary distribution"> <!-- Copy documentation subdirectories --> <mkdir dir="${dist.home}/docs"/> <copy todir="${dist.home}/docs"> <fileset dir="${docs.home}"/> </copy> <!-- Create application JAR file --> <jar jarfile="${dist.home}/${app.name}-${app.version}.war" basedir="${build.home}"/> <!-- Copy additional files to ${dist.home} as necessary --> </target> <!-- ==================== Install Target ================================== --> <!-- The "install" target tells the specified Tomcat 6 installation to dynamically install this web application and make it available for execution. It does *not* cause the existence of this web application to be remembered across Tomcat restarts; if you restart the server, you will need to re-install all this web application. If you have already installed this application, and simply want Tomcat to recognize that you have updated Java classes (or the web.xml file), use the "reload" target instead. NOTE: This target will only succeed if it is run from the same server that Tomcat is running on. NOTE: This is the logical opposite of the "remove" target. --> <target name="install" depends="compile" description="Install application to servlet container"> <deploy url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}" path="${app.path}" localWar="file://${build.home}"/> </target> <!-- ==================== Javadoc Target ================================== --> <!-- The "javadoc" target creates Javadoc API documentation for the Java classes included in your application. Normally, this is only required when preparing a distribution release, but is available as a separate target in case the developer wants to create Javadocs independently. --> <target name="javadoc" depends="compile" description="Create Javadoc API documentation"> <mkdir dir="${dist.home}/docs/api"/> <javadoc sourcepath="${src.home}" destdir="${dist.home}/docs/api" packagenames="*"> <classpath refid="compile.classpath"/> </javadoc> </target> <!-- ====================== List Target =================================== --> <!-- The "list" target asks the specified Tomcat 6 installation to list the currently running web applications, either loaded at startup time or installed dynamically. It is useful to determine whether or not the application you are currently developing has been installed. --> <target name="list" description="List installed applications on servlet container"> <list url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}"/> </target> <!-- ==================== Prepare Target ================================== --> <!-- The "prepare" target is used to create the "build" destination directory, and copy the static contents of your web application to it. If you need to copy static files from external dependencies, you can customize the contents of this task. Normally, this task is executed indirectly when needed. --> <target name="prepare"> <!-- Create build directories as needed --> <mkdir dir="${build.home}"/> <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF"/> <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/classes"/> <!-- Copy static content of this web application --> <copy todir="${build.home}"> <fileset dir="${web.home}"/> </copy> <!-- Copy external dependencies as required --> <!-- *** CUSTOMIZE HERE AS REQUIRED BY YOUR APPLICATION *** --> <mkdir dir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/lib"/> <!-- <copy todir="${build.home}/WEB-INF/lib" file="${foo.jar}"/> --> <!-- Copy static files from external dependencies as needed --> <!-- *** CUSTOMIZE HERE AS REQUIRED BY YOUR APPLICATION *** --> </target> <!-- ==================== Reload Target =================================== --> <!-- The "reload" signals the specified application Tomcat 6 to shut itself down and reload. This can be useful when the web application context is not reloadable and you have updated classes or property files in the /WEB-INF/classes directory or when you have added or updated jar files in the /WEB-INF/lib directory. NOTE: The /WEB-INF/web.xml web application configuration file is not reread on a reload. If you have made changes to your web.xml file you must stop then start the web application. --> <target name="reload" depends="compile" description="Reload application on servlet container"> <reload url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}" path="${app.path}"/> </target> <!-- ==================== Remove Target =================================== --> <!-- The "remove" target tells the specified Tomcat 6 installation to dynamically remove this web application from service. NOTE: This is the logical opposite of the "install" target. --> <target name="remove" description="Remove application on servlet container"> <undeploy url="${manager.url}" username="${manager.username}" password="${manager.password}" path="${app.path}"/> </target> </project>

    Read the article

  • Windows 8 Live Accounts and the actual Windows Account

    - by Rick Strahl
    As if Windows Security wasn't confusing enough, in Windows 8 we get thrown yet another curve ball with Windows Live accounts to logon. When I set up my Windows 8 machine I originally set it up with a 'real', non-live account that I always use on my Windows machines. I did this mainly so I have a matching account for resources around my home and intranet network so I could log on to network resources properly. At some point later I decided to set up Windows Live security just to see how changes things. Windows wants you to use Windows Live Windows 8 logins are required in order for the Windows RT account info to work. Not that I care - since installing Windows 8 I've maybe spent 10 minutes with Windows RT because - well it's pretty freaking sucky on the desktop. From shitty apps to mis-managed screen real estate I can't say that there's anything compelling there to date, but then I haven't looked that hard either. Anyway… I set up the Windows Live account to see if that changes things. It does - I do get all my live logins to work from Live Account so that Twitter and Facebook posts and pictures and calendars all show up on live tiles on the start screen and in the actual apps. That's nice-ish, but hardly that exciting given that all of the apps tied to those live tiles are average at best. And it would have been nice if all of this could be done without being forced into running with a Windows Live User Account - this all feels like strong-arming you into moving into Microsofts walled garden… and that's probably what it's meant to do. Who am I? The real problem to me though is that these Windows Live and raw Windows User accounts are a bit unpredictable especially when it comes to developer information about the account and which credentials to use. So for example Windows reports folder security like this: Notice it's showing my Windows Live account. Now if I go to Edit and try to add my Windows user account (rstrahl) it'll just automatically show up as the live account. On the other hand though the underlying system sees everything as my real Windows account. After I switched to a Windows Live login account and I have to login to Windows with my Live account, what do you suppose this returns?Console.WriteLine(Environment.UserName); It returns my raw Windows user account (rstrahl). All my permissions, all my actual settings and the desktop console altogether run under that account. If I look in TaskManager (or Process Explorer for me) I see: Everything running on the desktop shell with my login running under my Windows user account. I suppose it makes sense, but where is that association happening? When I switched to a Windows Live account, nowhere did I associate my real account with the Live account - it just happened. And looking through the account configuration dialogs I can't find any reference to the raw Windows account. Other than switching back I see no mention anywhere of the raw Windows account - everything refers to the Live account. Right then, clear as potato soup! So this is who you really are! The problem is that in some situations this schizophrenic account behavior gets a bit weird. Today I was running a local Web application in IIS that uses Windows Authentication - I tried to log-in with my real Windows account login because that's what I'm used to using with WINDOWS freaking Authentication through IIS. But… it failed. I checked my IIS settings, my apps login settings and I just could not for the life of me get into the site with my Windows username. That is until I finally realized that I should try using my Windows Live credentials instead. And that worked. So now in this Windows Authentication dialog I had to type in my Live ID and password, which is - just weird. Then in IIS if I look at a Trace page (or in my case my app's Status page) I see that the logged on account is - my Windows user account. What's really annoying about this is that in some places it uses the live account in other places it uses my Windows account. If I remote desktop into my Web server online - I have to use the local authentication dialog but I have to put in my real Windows credentials not the Live account. Oh yes, it's all so terribly intuitive and logical… So in summary, when you log on with a Live account you are actually mapped to an underlying Windows user. In any application if you check the user name it'll be the underlying user account (not sure what happens in a Windows RT app or even what mechanism is used there to get the user name info).  When logging on to local machine resource with user name and password you have to use your Live IDs even if the permissions on the resources are mapped to your underlying Windows account. Easy enough I suppose, but still not exactly intuitive behavior…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

    Read the article

  • Big Data – Buzz Words: What is Hadoop – Day 6 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is NoSQL. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – Hadoop. What is Hadoop? Apache Hadoop is an open-source, free and Java based software framework offers a powerful distributed platform to store and manage Big Data. It is licensed under an Apache V2 license. It runs applications on large clusters of commodity hardware and it processes thousands of terabytes of data on thousands of the nodes. Hadoop is inspired from Google’s MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers. The major advantage of Hadoop framework is that it provides reliability and high availability. What are the core components of Hadoop? There are two major components of the Hadoop framework and both fo them does two of the important task for it. Hadoop MapReduce is the method to split a larger data problem into smaller chunk and distribute it to many different commodity servers. Each server have their own set of resources and they have processed them locally. Once the commodity server has processed the data they send it back collectively to main server. This is effectively a process where we process large data effectively and efficiently. (We will understand this in tomorrow’s blog post). Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is a virtual file system. There is a big difference between any other file system and Hadoop. When we move a file on HDFS, it is automatically split into many small pieces. These small chunks of the file are replicated and stored on other servers (usually 3) for the fault tolerance or high availability. (We will understand this in the day after tomorrow’s blog post). Besides above two core components Hadoop project also contains following modules as well. Hadoop Common: Common utilities for the other Hadoop modules Hadoop Yarn: A framework for job scheduling and cluster resource management There are a few other projects (like Pig, Hive) related to above Hadoop as well which we will gradually explore in later blog posts. A Multi-node Hadoop Cluster Architecture Now let us quickly see the architecture of the a multi-node Hadoop cluster. A small Hadoop cluster includes a single master node and multiple worker or slave node. As discussed earlier, the entire cluster contains two layers. One of the layer of MapReduce Layer and another is of HDFC Layer. Each of these layer have its own relevant component. The master node consists of a JobTracker, TaskTracker, NameNode and DataNode. A slave or worker node consists of a DataNode and TaskTracker. It is also possible that slave node or worker node is only data or compute node. The matter of the fact that is the key feature of the Hadoop. In this introductory blog post we will stop here while describing the architecture of Hadoop. In a future blog post of this 31 day series we will explore various components of Hadoop Architecture in Detail. Why Use Hadoop? There are many advantages of using Hadoop. Let me quickly list them over here: Robust and Scalable – We can add new nodes as needed as well modify them. Affordable and Cost Effective – We do not need any special hardware for running Hadoop. We can just use commodity server. Adaptive and Flexible – Hadoop is built keeping in mind that it will handle structured and unstructured data. Highly Available and Fault Tolerant – When a node fails, the Hadoop framework automatically fails over to another node. Why Hadoop is named as Hadoop? In year 2005 Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella while working at Yahoo. Doug Cutting named Hadoop after his son’s toy elephant. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss Buzz Word – MapReduce. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

    Read the article

  • So you want a French Site?

    - by juanlarios
    I thought I would write a quick write up of how to create a french site in SharePoint 2007. I'm not talking about a Variation but just a plain French Site from the ground up. There were some gotchas that I felt were worth blogging about. First:  go to Microsoft Telnet Article and follow the install instructions. Make sure that when you get to the download page that you select "French" as part of the drop down and you download and install the right language pack. I noticed that if you did not click the "change" button enven though I selected the 'french' language pack, it reverted back to the english language pack.   Second: You will notice a couple of things. When you go to central admin you will see the following:    Now you can pick between french site or english. You will get this if you install other language packs and they will be listed in the drop down. You will notice that you now have french headings and frech listings of sites. You see "Publishing" as a heading because I have a custom site definition that I deployed as a french site. Third: As you start navigating around and trying to create document libraries or sites you will start getting errors. Errors like the following: "Cannot make a cache safe URL for "SelectorControls.js", file not found. Please verify that the file exists under the layouts directory. " Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services. Once you resolve the issue with this "js" file, you will find that there are other js files that are missing. The only problem is that if you are not fluent in French or the language you are trying to deploy, Well, you'll have a tough time understanding error messages as they will all be in the new language you are trying to deploy. So let's just talk about what happened when you installed the language pack. In the 12 Hive:  12/Template    you will now see a 1033 folder and a 1036 folder. The 1036 folder is the folder that was created and added as part of the language pack. What the above error is saying is that now that it's looking at the 1036 folder, well, it's missing some files. The nice thing is that these files are included in the 1033 folder (which is the English Language Pack). Simply copy and paste the controls from the one folder to the other. There will be more than one conflict so you will have to move serveral controls over. Can't remember how many but simply add them as error messages come up. I had to add some navigation controls and some content selectors.   Now that's all that you need to install the Frech Language pack anc reate site collections that are entirely in a another language. Do not mistake this with Variations, where you can have multiple language sites. For those of you doing a little bit extra with this, let me share what I was doing extra and what I needed to get it working for me. I had had a custom site definition which was obviously not showing up in my selection of french sites. I was under the impression that all sites in English would show up in french and that the sites were simply routed to a new Resource file for french content. And that is the case but there is a little extra that needs to be done if you have a custom site definition deployed:  First: Under hive 12/Template/1033/XML  there is a listing of site definition files that are deployed to the English side of things. If you navigate to 12/Template/1036/XML  and open one of the site definitions you will see that they are similar and reference the existing site definitions installed on the server, except that they have some french added to descriptions and names. Simply copy the xml file of your custom template to the 1036 folder to have it show up as a selection when you select French as the dropdown entry when create a site colleciton. You can go ahead and change the description and name to suit the language it's under.    Second: As part of my site definition, I packaed up several list templates, that were saved as STP files. When you navigate to the list template listing, well, the templates are for English sites, not French so I cannot create document libraries based on the template. What now? well here comes KWIzCom to the rescue! They seem to have put out a "STP language converter" where you can take a site template or list template and convert it to any target language you are after. It's a free download, Use it and you're good to go.  One thing I will mention is that when I convereted the English documents I whent ahead and converted them to French-Canadien. And it didn't work! so I finally figured out that the French Version it was expecting in the french site was "French-France". Don't know why that is, it's just what needs to be done to get that working. When I did that, I was able to use the List templates that I created in the English site for the French Site.   Hope it helps , good luck!

    Read the article

  • NoSQL Java API for MySQL Cluster: Questions & Answers

    - by Mat Keep
    The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster, and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability. Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs. First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers. ClusterJ and Cluster JPA ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used by JDO, JPA, and Hibernate. A simple API gives users extremely high performance for common operations: insert, delete, update, and query. ClusterJPA works with ClusterJ to extend functionality, including - Persistent classes - Relationships - Joins in queries - Lazy loading - Table and index creation from object model By eliminating data transformations via SQL, users get lower data access latency and higher throughput. In addition, Java developers have a more natural programming method to directly manage their data, with a complete, feature-rich solution for Object/Relational Mapping. As a result, the development of Java applications is simplified with faster development cycles resulting in accelerated time to market for new services. MySQL Cluster offers multiple NoSQL APIs alongside Java: - Memcached for a persistent, high performance, write-scalable Key/Value store, - HTTP/REST via an Apache module - C++ via the NDB API for the lowest absolute latency. Developers can use SQL as well as NoSQL APIs for access to the same data set via multiple query patterns – from simple Primary Key lookups or inserts to complex cross-shard JOINs using Adaptive Query Localization Marrying NoSQL and SQL access to an ACID-compliant database offers developers a number of benefits. MySQL Cluster’s distributed, shared-nothing architecture with auto-sharding and real time performance makes it a great fit for workloads requiring high volume OLTP. Users also get the added flexibility of being able to run real-time analytics across the same OLTP data set for real-time business insight. OK – hopefully you now have a better idea of why ClusterJ and JPA are available. Now, for the Q&A. Q & A Q. Why would I use Connector/J vs. ClusterJ? A. Partly it's a question of whether you prefer to work with SQL (Connector/J) or objects (ClusterJ). Performance of ClusterJ will be better as there is no need to pass through the MySQL Server. A ClusterJ operation can only act on a single table (e.g. no joins) - ClusterJPA extends that capability Q. Can I mix different APIs (ie ClusterJ, Connector/J) in our application for different query types? A. Yes. You can mix and match all of the API types, SQL, JDBC, ODBC, ClusterJ, Memcached, REST, C++. They all access the exact same data in the data nodes. Update through one API and new data is instantly visible to all of the others. Q. How many TCP connections would a SessionFactory instance create for a cluster of 8 data nodes? A. SessionFactory has a connection to the mgmd (management node) but otherwise is just a vehicle to create Sessions. Without using connection pooling, a SessionFactory will have one connection open with each data node. Using optional connection pooling allows multiple connections from the SessionFactory to increase throughput. Q. Can you give details of how Cluster J optimizes sharding to enhance performance of distributed query processing? A. Each data node in a cluster runs a Transaction Coordinator (TC), which begins and ends the transaction, but also serves as a resource to operate on the result rows. While an API node (such as a ClusterJ process) can send queries to any TC/data node, there are performance gains if the TC is where most of the result data is stored. ClusterJ computes the shard (partition) key to choose the data node where the row resides as the TC. Q. What happens if we perform two primary key lookups within the same transaction? Are they sent to the data node in one transaction? A. ClusterJ will send identical PK lookups to the same data node. Q. How is distributed query processing handled by MySQL Cluster ? A. If the data is split between data nodes then all of the information will be transparently combined and passed back to the application. The session will connect to a data node - typically by hashing the primary key - which then interacts with its neighboring nodes to collect the data needed to fulfil the query. Q. Can I use Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster A. Support for Foreign Keys is included in the MySQL Cluster 7.3 Early Access release Summary The NoSQL Java APIs are packaged with MySQL Cluster, available for download here so feel free to take them for a spin today! Key Resources MySQL Cluster on-line demo  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA On-demand webinar  MySQL ClusterJ and JPA documentation MySQL ClusterJ and JPA whitepaper and tutorial

    Read the article

  • SQL SERVER – What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1

    - by Pinal Dave
    This is the first part of the series Incremental Statistics. Here is the index of the complete series. What is Incremental Statistics? – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 1 Simple Example of Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 2 DMV to Identify Incremental Statistics – Performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 – Part 3 Statistics are considered one of the most important aspects of SQL Server Performance Tuning. You might have often heard the phrase, with related to performance tuning. “Update Statistics before you take any other steps to tune performance”. Honestly, I have said above statement many times and many times, I have personally updated statistics before I start to do any performance tuning exercise. You may agree or disagree to the point, but there is no denial that Statistics play an extremely vital role in the performance tuning. SQL Server 2014 has a new feature called Incremental Statistics. I have been playing with this feature for quite a while and I find that very interesting. After spending some time with this feature, I decided to write about this subject over here. New in SQL Server 2014 – Incremental Statistics Well, it seems like lots of people wants to start using SQL Server 2014′s new feature of Incremetnal Statistics. However, let us understand what actually this feature does and how it can help. I will try to simplify this feature first before I start working on the demo code. Code for all versions of SQL Server Here is the code which you can execute on all versions of SQL Server and it will update the statistics of your table. The keyword which you should pay attention is WITH FULLSCAN. It will scan the entire table and build brand new statistics for you which your SQL Server Performance Tuning engine can use for better estimation of your execution plan. UPDATE STATISTICS TableName(StatisticsName) WITH FULLSCAN Who should learn about this? Why? If you are using partitions in your database, you should consider about implementing this feature. Otherwise, this feature is pretty much not applicable to you. Well, if you are using single partition and your table data is in a single place, you still have to update your statistics the same way you have been doing. If you are using multiple partitions, this may be a very useful feature for you. In most cases, users have multiple partitions because they have lots of data in their table. Each partition will have data which belongs to itself. Now it is very common that each partition are populated separately in SQL Server. Real World Example For example, if your table contains data which is related to sales, you will have plenty of entries in your table. It will be a good idea to divide the partition into multiple filegroups for example, you can divide this table into 3 semesters or 4 quarters or even 12 months. Let us assume that we have divided our table into 12 different partitions. Now for the month of January, our first partition will be populated and for the month of February our second partition will be populated. Now assume, that you have plenty of the data in your first and second partition. Now the month of March has just started and your third partition has started to populate. Due to some reason, if you want to update your statistics, what will you do? In SQL Server 2012 and earlier version You will just use the code of WITH FULLSCAN and update the entire table. That means even though you have only data in third partition you will still update the entire table. This will be VERY resource intensive process as you will be updating the statistics of the partition 1 and 2 where data has not changed at all. In SQL Server 2014 You will just update the partition of Partition 3. There is a special syntax where you can now specify which partition you want to update now. The impact of this is that it is smartly merging the new data with old statistics and update the entire statistics without doing FULLSCAN of your entire table. This has a huge impact on performance. Remember that the new feature in SQL Server 2014 does not change anything besides the capability to update a single partition. However, there is one feature which is indeed attractive. Previously, when table data were changed 20% at that time, statistics update were triggered. However, now the same threshold is applicable to a single partition. That means if your partition faces 20% data, change it will also trigger partition level statistics update which, when merged to your final statistics will give you better performance. In summary If you are not using a partition, this feature is not applicable to you. If you are using a partition, this feature can be very helpful to you. Tomorrow: We will see working code of SQL Server 2014 Incremental Statistics. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Statistics, Statistics

    Read the article

  • Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

    - by Roger Hart
    Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

    Read the article

  • IBM Keynote: (hardware,software)–>{IBM.java.patterns}

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    On Sunday evening, September 30, 2012, Jason McGee, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Cloud Computing, along with John Duimovich IBM Distinguished Engineer and Java CTO, gave an information- and idea-rich keynote that left Java developers with much to ponder.Their focus was on the challenges to make Java more efficient and productive given the hardware and software environments of 2012. “One idea that is very interesting is the idea of multi-tenancy,” said McGee, “and how we can move up the spectrum. In traditional systems, we ran applications on dedicated middleware, operating systems and hardware. A lot of customers still run that way. Now people introduce hardware virtualization and share the hardware. That is good but there is a lot more we can do. We can share middleware and the application itself.” McGee challenged developers to better enable the Java language to function in these higher density models. He spoke about the need to describe patterns that help us grasp the full environment that an application needs, whether it’s a web or full enterprise application. Developers need to understand the resources that an application interacts with in a way that is simple and straightforward. The task is to then automate that deployment so that the complexity of infrastructure can be by-passed and developers can live in a simpler world where the cloud can automatically configure the needed environment. McGee argued that the key, something IBM has been working on, is to use a simpler pattern that allows a cloud-based architecture to embrace the entire infrastructure required for an application and make it highly available, scalable and able to recover from failure. The cloud-based architecture would automate the complexity of setting up and managing the infrastructure. IBM has been trying to realize this vision for customers so they can describe their Java application environment simply and allow the cloud to automate the deployment and management of applications. “The point,” explained McGee, “is to package the executable used to describe applications, to drop it into a shared system and let that system provide some intelligence about how to deploy and manage those applications.”John Duimovich on Improvements in JavaMcGee then brought onstage IBM’s Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Java, John Duimovich, who showed the audience ways to deploy Java applications more efficiently.Duimovich explained that, “When you run lots of copies of Java in the cloud or any hypervisor virtualized system, there are a lot of duplications of code and jar files. IBM has a facility called ‘shared classes’ where we put shared code, read only artefacts in a cache that is sharable across hypervisors.” By putting JIT code in ahead of time, he explained that the application server will use 20% less memory and operate 30% faster.  He described another example of how the JVM allows for the maximum amount of sharing that manages the tenants and file sockets and memory use through throttling and control. Duimovich touched on the “thin is in” model and IBM’s Liberty Profile and lightweight runtime for the cloud, which allows for greater efficiency in interacting with the cloud.Duimovich discussed the confusion Java developers experience when, for example, the hypervisor tells them that that they have 8 and then 4 and then 16 cores. “Because hypervisors are virtualized, they can change based on resource needs across the hypervisor layer. You may have 10 instances of an operation system and you may need to reallocate memory, " explained Duimovich.  He showed how to resize LPARs, reallocate CPUs and migrate applications as needed. He explained how application servers can resize thread pools and better use resources based on information from the hypervisors.Java Challenges in Hardware and SoftwareMcGee ended the keynote with a summary of upcoming hardware and software challenges for the Java platform. He noted that one reason developers love Java is it allows them to ignore differences in hardware. He stated that the most important things happening in hardware were in network and storage – in developments such as the speed of SSD, the exploitation of high-speed, low-latency networking, and recent developments such as storage-class memory, and non-volatile main memory. “So we are challenged to maintain the benefits of Java and the abstraction it provides from hardware while still exploiting the new innovations in hardware,” said McGee.McGee discussed transactional messaging applications where developers send messages transactionally persist a message to storage, something traditionally done by backing messages on spinning disks, something mostly outdated. “Now,” he pointed out, “we would use SSD and store it in Flash and get 70,000 messages a second. If we stored it using a PCI express-based flash memory device, it is still Flash but put on a PCI express bus on a card closer to the CPU. This way I get 300,000 messages a second and 25% improvement in latency.” McGee’s central point was that hardware has a huge impact on the performance and scalability of applications. New technologies are enabling developers to build classes of Java applications previously unheard of. “We need to be able to balance these things in Java – we need to maintain the abstraction but also be able to exploit the evolution of hardware technology,” said McGee. According to McGee, IBM's current focus is on systems wherein hardware and software are shipped together in what are called Expert Integrated Systems – systems that are pre-optimized, and pre-integrated together. McGee closed IBM’s engaging and thought-provoking keynote by pointing out that the use of Java in complex applications is increasingly being augmented by a host of other languages with strong communities around them – JavaScript, JRuby, Scala, Python and so forth. Java developers now must understand the strengths and weaknesses of such newcomers as applications increasingly involve a complex interconnection of languages.

    Read the article

  • Windows Azure Recipe: Enterprise LOBs

    - by Clint Edmonson
    Enterprises are more and more dependent on their specialized internal Line of Business (LOB) applications than ever before. Naturally, the more software they leverage on-premises, the more infrastructure they need manage. It’s frequently the case that our customers simply can’t scale up their hardware purchases and operational staff as fast as internal demand for software requires. The result is that getting new or enhanced applications in the hands of business users becomes slower and more expensive every day. Being able to quickly deliver applications in a rapidly changing business environment while maintaining high standards of corporate security is a challenge that can be met right now by moving enterprise LOBs out into the cloud and leveraging Azure’s Access Control services. In fact, we’re seeing many of our customers (both large and small) see huge benefits from moving their web based business applications such as corporate help desks, expense tracking, travel portals, timesheets, and more to Windows Azure. Drivers Cost Reduction Time to market Security Solution Here’s a sketch of how many Windows Azure Enterprise LOBs are being architected and deployed: Ingredients Web Role – this will host the core of the application. Each web role is a virtual machine hosting an application written in ASP.NET (or optionally php, or node.js). The number of web roles can be scaled up or down as needed to handle peak and non-peak traffic loads. Many Java based applications are also being deployed to Windows Azure with a little more effort. Database – every modern web application needs to store data. SQL Azure databases look and act exactly like their on-premise siblings but are fault tolerant and have data redundancy built in. Access Control – this service is necessary to establish federated identity between the cloud hosted application and an enterprise’s corporate network. It works in conjunction with a secure token service (STS) that is hosted on-premises to establish the corporate user’s identity and credentials. The source code for an on-premises STS is provided in the Windows Azure training kit and merely needs to be customized for the corporate environment and published on a publicly accessible corporate web site. Once set up, corporate users see a near seamless single sign-on experience. Reporting – businesses live and die by their reports and SQL Azure Reporting, based on SQL Server Reporting 2008 R2, can serve up reports with tables, charts, maps, gauges, and more. These reports can be accessed from the Windows Azure Portal, through a web browser, or directly from applications. Service Bus (optional) – if deep integration with other applications and systems is needed, the service bus is the answer. It enables secure service layer communication between applications hosted behind firewalls in on-premises or partner datacenters and applications hosted inside Windows Azure. The Service Bus provides the ability to securely expose just the information and services that are necessary to create a simpler, more secure architecture than opening up a full blown VPN. Data Sync (optional) – in cases where the data stored in the cloud needs to be shared internally, establishing a secure one-way or two-way data-sync connection between the on-premises and off-premises databases is a perfect option. It can be very granular, allowing us to specify exactly what tables and columns to synchronize, setup filters to sync only a subset of rows, set the conflict resolution policy for two-way sync, and specify how frequently data should be synchronized Training Labs These links point to online Windows Azure training labs where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.) Windows Azure (16 labs) Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML SQL Azure (7 labs) Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Windows Azure Services (9 labs) As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure. See my Windows Azure Resource Guide for more guidance on how to get started, including links web portals, training kits, samples, and blogs related to Windows Azure.

    Read the article

  • ASP.NET WebAPI Security 4: Examples for various Authentication Scenarios

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    The Thinktecture.IdentityModel.Http repository includes a number of samples for the various authentication scenarios. All the clients follow a basic pattern: Acquire client credential (a single token, multiple tokens, username/password). Call Service. The service simply enumerates the claims it finds on the request and returns them to the client. I won’t show that part of the code, but rather focus on the step 1 and 2. Basic Authentication This is the most basic (pun inteneded) scenario. My library contains a class that can create the Basic Authentication header value. Simply set username and password and you are good to go. var client = new HttpClient { BaseAddress = _baseAddress }; client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new BasicAuthenticationHeaderValue("alice", "alice"); var response = client.GetAsync("identity").Result; response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();   SAML Authentication To integrate a Web API with an existing enterprise identity provider like ADFS, you can use SAML tokens. This is certainly not the most efficient way of calling a “lightweight service” ;) But very useful if that’s what it takes to get the job done. private static string GetIdentityToken() {     var factory = new WSTrustChannelFactory(         new WindowsWSTrustBinding(SecurityMode.Transport),         _idpEndpoint);     factory.TrustVersion = TrustVersion.WSTrust13;     var rst = new RequestSecurityToken     {         RequestType = RequestTypes.Issue,         KeyType = KeyTypes.Bearer,         AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress(Constants.Realm)     };     var token = factory.CreateChannel().Issue(rst) as GenericXmlSecurityToken;     return token.TokenXml.OuterXml; } private static Identity CallService(string saml) {     var client = new HttpClient { BaseAddress = _baseAddress };     client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("SAML", saml);     var response = client.GetAsync("identity").Result;     response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();     return response.Content.ReadAsAsync<Identity>().Result; }   SAML to SWT conversion using the Azure Access Control Service Another possible options for integrating SAML based identity providers is to use an intermediary service that allows converting the SAML token to the more compact SWT (Simple Web Token) format. This way you only need to roundtrip the SAML once and can use the SWT afterwards. The code for the conversion uses the ACS OAuth2 endpoint. The OAuth2Client class is part of my library. private static string GetServiceTokenOAuth2(string samlToken) {     var client = new OAuth2Client(_acsOAuth2Endpoint);     return client.RequestAccessTokenAssertion(         samlToken,         SecurityTokenTypes.Saml2TokenProfile11,         Constants.Realm).AccessToken; }   SWT Authentication When you have an identity provider that directly supports a (simple) web token, you can acquire the token directly without the conversion step. Thinktecture.IdentityServer e.g. supports the OAuth2 resource owner credential profile to issue SWT tokens. private static string GetIdentityToken() {     var client = new OAuth2Client(_oauth2Address);     var response = client.RequestAccessTokenUserName("bob", "abc!123", Constants.Realm);     return response.AccessToken; } private static Identity CallService(string swt) {     var client = new HttpClient { BaseAddress = _baseAddress };     client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Authorization = new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Bearer", swt);     var response = client.GetAsync("identity").Result;     response.EnsureSuccessStatusCode();     return response.Content.ReadAsAsync<Identity>().Result; }   So you can see that it’s pretty straightforward to implement various authentication scenarios using WebAPI and my authentication library. Stay tuned for more client samples!

    Read the article

  • Adventures in Scrum: Lesson 1 &ndash; The failed Sprint

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    I recently had a conversation with a product owner that wanted to have the Scrum team broken up into smaller units so that less time was wasted on the Scrum Ceremonies! Their complaint was around the need in Scrum to have the entire “Team” (7+-2) involved in the sizing of the work during the “Sprint Planning Meeting”.  The standard flippant answer of all Scrum professionals, “Well that's not Scrum”, does not get you any brownie points in these situations. The response could be “Well we are not doing Scrum then” which in turn leads to “We are doing Scrum…But, we have split the scrum team into units of 2/3 so that they can concentrate on a specific area of work”. While this may work, it is not Scrum and should not be called so… It is just a form of Agile. Don’t get me wrong at this stage, there is nothing wrong with Agile, just don’t call it Scrum. The reason that the Product Owner wants to do this is that, in effect, through a number of miscommunications and failings in our implementation of Scrum, there was NO unit of potentially Shippable software at the end of the first sprint. It does not matter to them that most Scrum teams will fail the first Sprint, even those that are high performing teams. Remember it is the product owners their money! We should NOT break up scrum teams into smaller units for the purpose of having less people tied up in the Scrum Ceremonies. The amount of backlog the Team selects is solely up to the Team… Only the Team can assess what it can accomplish over the upcoming Sprint. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org The entire team must accept the work and in order to understand what they can accept they must be free to size it as a team. This both encourages common understanding and increases visibility on why team members think a task is of a particular size. This has the benefit of increasing the knowledge of the entire team in the problem domain. A new Team often first realizes that it will either sink or swim as a Team, not individually, in this meeting. The Team realizes that it must rely on itself. As it realizes this, it starts to self-organize to take on the characteristics and behaviour of a real Team. - Scrum Guide, Scrum.org This paragraph goes to the why of having the whole team at the meeting; The goal of Scrum it to produce a unit of potentially shippable software at the end of every Sprint. In order to achieve this we need high performing teams and this is what Scrum as a framework has been optimised to produce. I think that our Product Owner is understandably upset over loosing two weeks work and is losing sight the end goal of Scrum in the failures of the moment. As the man spending the money, I completely understand his perspective and I think that we should not have started Scrum on an internal project, but selected a customer  that is open to the ideas and complications of Scrum. So, what should we have NOT done on our first Scrum project: Should not have had 3 interns as the only on site resource – This lead to bad practices as the experienced guys were not there helping and correcting as they usually would. Should not have had the only experienced guys offsite – With both the experienced technical guys in completely different time zones it was difficult to get time for questions. Helping the guys on site was just plain impossible. Should not have used a part time ScrumMaster – Although the ScrumMaster attended all of the Ceremonies, because they are only in 2 full days of the week it makes it difficult for the team to raise impediments as they go. Should not have used a proxy product owner. – This was probably the worst decision that was made. Mainly because the proxy product owner did not have the same vision as the product owner. While Scrum does not explicitly reject the idea of a Proxy Product Owner, I do not think it works very well in practice. The “single wringable neck” needs to contain both the Money and the Vision as well as attending the required meetings. I will be brining all of these things up at the Sprint Retrospective and we will learn from our mistakes and move on. Do, Inspect then Adapt…   Technorati Tags: Scrum,Sprint Planing,Sprint Retrospective,Scrum.org,Scrum Guide,Scrum Ceremonies,Scrummaster,Product Owner Need Help? Professional Scrum Developer Training SSW has six Professional Scrum Developer Trainers who specialise in training your developers in implementing Scrum with Microsoft's Visual Studio ALM tools.

    Read the article

  • iPack -The iOS Application Packager

    - by user13277780
    iOS applications are distributed in .ipa archive files. These files are regular zip files which contain application resources and executable-s. To protect them from unauthorized modifications and to provide identification of their sources, the content of the archives is signed. The signature is included in the application executable of an.ipa archive and protects the executable file itself and the associated resource files. Apple provides native Mac OS tools for signing iOS executable-s (which are actually generic Mach-O code signing tools), but these tools are not generally available on other platforms. To provide a multi-platform development environment for JavaFX based iOS applications, we ported iOS signing and packaging to Java and created a dedicated ipack tool for it. The iPack tool can be used as a last step of creating .ipa package on various operating systems. Prototype has been tested by creating a final distributable for JavaFX application that runs on iPad, all done on Windows 7. Source Code The source code of iPac tool is in OpenJFX project repository. You can find it in: <openjfx root>/rt/tools/ios/Maven/ipack To build the iPack tool use: rt/tools/ios/Maven/ipack$ mvn package After building, you can run the tool: java -jar <path to ipack.jar> <arguments>  Signing keystore The tool uses a java key store to read the signing certificate and the associated private key. To prepare such keystore users can use keytool from JDK. One possible scenario is to import an existing private key and the certificate from a key store used on Mac OS: To list the content of an existing key store and identify the source alias: keytool -list -keystore <src keystore>.p12 -storetype pkcs12 -storepass <src keystore password> To create Java key store and import the private key with its certificate to the keys store: keytool -importkeystore \ -destkeystore <dst keystore> -deststorepass <dst keystore password> \ -srckeystore <src keystore>.p12 -srcstorepass <src keystore password> -srcstoretype pkcs12 \ -srcalias <src alias> -destalias <dst alias> -destkeypass <dst key password> Another scenario would be to generate a private / public key pair directly in a Java key store and create a certificate request from it. After sending the request to Apple one can then import the certificate response back to the Java key store and complete the signing certificate entry. In both scenarios the resulting alias in the Java key store will contain only a single (leaf) certificate. This can be verified with the following command: keytool -list -v -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> When looking at the Certificate chain length entry, the number next to it is 1. When an executable file is signed on Mac OS, the resulting signature (in CMS format) includes the whole certificate chain up to the Apple Root CA. The ipack tool includes only the chain which is stored under the alias specified on the command line. So to have the whole chain in the signature we need to replace the single certificate entry under the alias with the corresponding full certificate chain. To do that we need first to create the chain in a separate file. It is easy to create such chain when working with certificates in Base-64 encoded PEM format. A certificate chain can be created by concatenating PEM certificates, which should form the chain, into a single file. For iOS signing we need the following certificates in our chain: Apple Root CA Apple Worldwide Developer Relations CA Our signing leaf certificate To convert a certificate from the binary DER format (.der, .cer) to PEM format: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert -file <certificate>.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert -rfc -file <certificate>.pem To export the signing certificate into PEM format: keytool -exportcert -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> -alias <signing alias> -rfc -file SigningCert.pem After constructing a chain from AppleIncRootCertificate.pem, AppleWWDRCA.pem andSigningCert.pem, it can be imported back into the keystore with: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore <ipack keystore> -storepass <keystore password> -alias <signing alias> -keypass <key password> -file SigningCertChain.pem To summarize, the following example shows the full certificate chain replacement process: keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert1 -file AppleIncRootCertificate.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert1 -rfc -file AppleIncRootCertificate.pem keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert2 -file AppleWWDRCA.cer keytool -exportcert -keystore temp.ks -storepass temppwd -alias tempcert2 -rfc -file AppleWWDRCA.pem keytool -exportcert -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -rfc -file SigningCert.pem cat SigningCert.pem AppleWWDRCA.pem AppleIncRootCertificate.pem >SigningCertChain.pem keytool -importcert -noprompt -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -keypass keypwd -file SigningCertChain.pem keytool -list -v -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd Usage When the ipack tool is started with no arguments it prints the following usage information: -appname MyApplication -appid com.myorg.MyApplication     Usage: ipack <archive> <signing opts> <application opts> [ <application opts> ... ] Signing options: -keystore <keystore> keystore to use for signing -storepass <password> keystore password -alias <alias> alias for the signing certificate chain and the associated private key -keypass <password> password for the private key Application options: -basedir <directory> base directory from which to derive relative paths -appdir <directory> directory with the application executable and resources -appname <file> name of the application executable -appid <id> application identifier Example: ipack MyApplication.ipa -keystore ipack.ks -storepass keystorepwd -alias mycert -keypass keypwd -basedir mysources/MyApplication/dist -appdir Payload/MyApplication.app -appname MyApplication -appid com.myorg.MyApplication    

    Read the article

  • Blog Buzz - Devoxx 2011

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    Some day I will make it to Devoxx – for now, I’m content to vicariously follow the blogs of attendees and pick up on what’s happening.  I’ve been doing more blog "fishing," looking for the best commentary on 2011 Devoxx. There’s plenty of food for thought – and the ideas are not half-baked.The bloggers are out in full, offering useful summaries and commentary on Devoxx goings-on.Constantin Partac, a Java developer and a member of Transylvania JUG, a community from Cluj-Napoca/Romania, offers an excellent summary of the Devoxx keynotes. Here’s a sample:“Oracle Opening Keynote and JDK 7, 8, and 9 Presentation•    Oracle is committed to Java and wants to provide support for it on any device.•    JSE 7 for Mac will be released next week.•    Oracle would like Java developers to be involved in JCP, to adopt a JSR and to attend local JUG meetings.•    JEE 7 will be released next year.•    JEE 7 is focused on cloud integration, some of the features are already implemented in glassfish 4 development branch.•    JSE 8 will be release in summer of 2013 due to “enterprise community request” as they can not keep the pace with an 18    month release cycle.•    The main features included in JSE8 are lambda support, project Jigsaw, new Date/Time API, project Coin++ and adding   support for sensors. JSE 9 probably will focus on some of these features:1.    self tuning JVM2.    improved native language integration3.    processing enhancement for big data4.    reification (adding runtime class type info for generic types)5.    unification of primitive and corresponding object classes6.    meta-object protocol in order to use type and methods define in other JVM languages7.    multi-tenancy8.    JVM resource management” Thanks Constantin! Ivan St. Ivanov, of SAP Labs Bulgaria, also commented on the keynotes with a different focus.  He summarizes Henrik Stahl’s look ahead to Java SE 8 and JavaFX 3.0; Cameron Purdy on Java EE and the cloud; celebrated Java Champion Josh Bloch on what’s good and bad about Java; Mark Reinhold’s quick look ahead to Java SE 9; and Brian Goetz on lambdas and default methods in Java SE 8. Here’s St. Ivanov’s account of Josh Bloch’s comments on the pluses of Java:“He started with the virtues of the platform. To name a few:    Tightly specified language primitives and evaluation order – int is always 32 bits and operations are executed always from left  to right, without compilers messing around    Dynamic linking – when you change a class, you need to recompile and rebuild just the jar that has it and not the whole application    Syntax  similarity with C/C++ – most existing developers at that time felt like at home    Object orientations – it was cool at that time as well as functional programming is today    It was statically typed language – helps in faster runtime, better IDE support, etc.    No operator overloading – well, I’m not sure why it is good. Scala has it for example and that’s why it is far better for defining DSLs. But I will not argue with Josh.”It’s worth checking out St. Ivanov’s summary of Bloch’s views on what’s not so great about Java as well. What's Coming in JAX-RS 2.0Marek Potociar, Principal Software Engineer at Oracle and currently specification lead of Java EE RESTful web services API (JAX-RS), blogged on his talk about what's coming in JAX-RS 2.0, scheduled for final release in mid-2012.  Here’s a taste:“Perhaps the most wanted addition to the JAX-RS is the Client API, that would complete the JAX-RS story, that is currently server-side only. In JAX-RS 2.0 we are adding a completely interface-based and fluent client API that blends nicely in with the existing fluent response builder pattern on the server-side. When we started with the client API, the first proposal contained around 30 classes. Thanks to the feedback from our Expert Group we managed to reduce the number of API classes to 14 (2 of them being exceptions)! The resulting is compact while at the same time we still managed to create an API that reflects the method invocation context flow (e.g. once you decide on the target URI and start setting headers on the request, your IDE will not try to offer you a URI setter in the code completion). This is a subtle but very important usability aspect of an API…” Obviously, Devoxx is a great Java conference, one that is hitting this year at a time when much is brewing in the platform and beginning to be anticipated.

    Read the article

  • 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.

    Read the article

  • Create a Smoother Period Close

    - by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team
    Untitled Document Do You Use Oracle E-Business Suite Products Involved in Accounting Period Closes? We understand that closing the periods in your system at the end of an accounting period enables your company to make the right business decisions. We also know this requires prior preparation, good procedures, and quality data. To help you meet that need, Oracle E-Business Suite’s proactive support team developed the Period Close Advisor to help your organization conduct a smooth period close for its Oracle E-Business Suite 12 products. The Period Close Advisor is composed of logical steps you can follow, aligned by the business requirement flow. It will help with an orderly close of the product sub-ledgers before posting to the General Ledger. It combines recommendations and industry best practices with tips from subject matter experts for troubleshooting. You will find patches needed and references to assist you during each phase. Get to know the E-Business Suite Period Close Advisor The Period Close Advisor does more than help the users of Oracle E-Business Suite products close their period. You can use it before and throughout the period to stay on track. Proactively it assists you as you set up your company’s period close process. During the period, it helps evaluate your system’s readiness for initiating the period close procedures and prepare the system for a smooth period close experience. The Period Close Advisor gets you to answers when you have questions and gives you the latest news from us on Oracle E-Business Suite’s period close. The Period Close Advisor is the right place to start. How to Use the E-Business Suite Period Close The Period Close Advisor graphically guides you through your period close. The tabs show you the products (also called applications or sub-ledgers) covered, and the product order required for the processing to handle any dependencies between the products. Users of all the products it covers can benefit from the information it contains. Structure of the Period Close Advisor Clicking on a tab gives you the details for that particular step in the process. This includes an overview, showing how the products fit into the overall period close process, and step-by-step information on each phase needed to complete the period close for the tab. You will also find multimedia training and related resources you can access if you need more information. Once you click on any of the phases, you see guidance for that phase. This can include: Tips from the subject-matter experts—here are examples from a Cash Management specialist: “For organizations with high transaction volumes bank statements should be loaded and reconciled on a daily basis.” “The automatic reconciliation process can be set up to create miscellaneous transactions automatically.” References to useful Knowledge Base documents: Information Centers for the products and features FAQs on functionality Known Issues and patches with both the errors and their solutions How-to documents that explain in detail how to use a feature or complete a process White papers that give overview of a feature, list setup required to use the feature, etc. Links to diagnosticsthat help debug issues you may find in a process Additional information and alerts about a process or reports that can help you prevent issues from surfacing This excerpt from the “Process Transaction” phase for the Receivables product lists documents you’ll find helpful. How to Get Started with the Period Close Advisor The Period Close Advisor is a great resource that can be used both as a proactive tool (while setting up your period end procedures) and as the first document to refer to when you encounter an issue during the period close procedures! As mentioned earlier, the order of the product tabs in the Period Close Advisor gives you the recommended order of closing. The first thing to do is to ensure that you are following the prescribed order for closing the period, if you are using more than one sub-ledger. Next, review the information shared in the Evaluate and Prepare and Process Transactions phases. Make sure that you are following the recommended best practices; you have applied the recommended patches, etc. The Reconcile phase gives you the recommended steps to follow for reconciling a sub-ledger with the General Ledger. Ensure that your reconciliation procedure aligns with those steps. At any stage during the period close processing, if you encounter an issue, you can revisit the Period Close Advisor. Choose the product you have an issue with and then select the phase you are in. You will be able to review information that can help you find a solution to the issue you are facing. Stay Informed Oracle updates the Period Close Advisor as we learn of new issues and information. Bookmark the Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close Advisor [ID 335.1] and keep coming back to it for the latest information on period close

    Read the article

  • The JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote

    - by Janice J. Heiss
    At the JavaOne 2012 Sunday Technical Keynote, held at the Masonic Auditorium, Mark Reinhold, Chief Architect, Java Platform Group, stated that they were going to do things a bit differently--"rather than 20 minutes of SE, and 20 minutes of FX, and 20 minutes of EE, we're going to mix it up a little," he said. "For much of it, we're going to be showing a single application, to show off some of the great work that's been done in the last year, and how Java can scale well--from the cloud all the way down to some very small embedded devices, and how JavaFX scales right along with it."Richard Bair and Jasper Potts from the JavaFX team demonstrated a JavaOne schedule builder application with impressive navigation, animation, pop-overs, and transitions. They noted that the application runs seamlessly on either Windows or Macs, running Java 7. They then ran the same application on an Ubuntu Linux machine--"it just works," said Blair.The JavaFX duo next put the recently released JavaFX Scene Builder through its paces -- dragging and dropping various image assets to build the application's UI, then fine tuning a CSS file for the finished look and feel. Among many other new features, in the past six months, JavaFX has released support for H.264 and HTTP live streaming, "so you can get all the real media playing inside your JavaFX application," said Bair. And in their developer preview builds of JavaFX 8, they've now split the rendering thread from the UI thread, to better take advantage of multi-core architectures.Next, Brian Goetz, Java Language Architect, explored language and library features planned for Java SE 8, including Lambda expressions and better parallel libraries. These feature changes both simplify code and free-up libraries to more effectively use parallelism. "It's currently still a lot of work to convert an application from serial to parallel," noted Goetz.Reinhold had previously boasted of Java scaling down to "small embedded devices," so Blair and Potts next ran their schedule builder application on a small embedded PandaBoard system with an OMAP4 chip set. Connected to a touch screen, the embedded board ran the same JavaFX application previously seen on the desktop systems, but now running on Java SE Embedded. (The systems can be seen and tried at four of the nearby JavaOne hotels.) Bob Vandette, Java Embedded Architect, then displayed a $25 Rasberry Pi ARM-based system running Java SE Embedded, noting the even greater need for the platform independence of Java in such highly varied embedded processor spaces. Reinhold and Vandetta discussed Project Jigsaw, the planned modularization of the Java SE platform, and its deferral from the Java 8 release to Java 9. Reinhold demonstrated the promise of Jigsaw by running a modularized demo version of the earlier schedule builder application on the resource constrained Rasberry Pi system--although the demo gods were not smiling down, and the application ultimately crashed.Reinhold urged developers to become involved in the Java 8 development process--getting the weekly builds, trying out their current code, and trying out the new features:http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jdk8/spechttp://jdk8.java.netFrom there, Arun Gupta explored Java EE. The primary themes of Java EE 7, Gupta stated, will be greater productivity, and HTML 5 functionality (WebSocket, JSON, and HTML 5 forms). Part of the planned productivity increase of the release will come from a reduction in writing boilerplate code--through the widespread use of dependency injection in the platform, along with default data sources and default connection factories. Gupta noted the inclusion of JAX-RS in the web profile, the changes and improvements found in JMS 2.0, as well as enhancements to Java EE 7 in terms of JPA 2.1 and EJB 3.2. GlassFish 4 is the reference implementation of Java EE 7, and currently includes WebSocket, JSON, JAX-RS 2.0, JMS 2.0, and more. The final release is targeted for Q2, 2013. Looking forward to Java EE 8, Gupta explored how the platform will provide multi-tenancy for applications, modularity based on Jigsaw, and cloud architecture. Meanwhile, Project Avatar is the group's incubator project for designing an end-to-end framework for building HTML 5 applications. Santiago Pericas-Geertsen joined Gupta to demonstrate their "Angry Bids" auction/live-bid/chat application using many of the enhancements of Java EE 7, along with an Avatar HTML 5 infrastructure, and running on the GlassFish reference implementation.Finally, Gupta covered Project Easel, an advanced tooling capability in NetBeans for HTML5. John Ceccarelli, NetBeans Engineering Director, joined Gupta to demonstrate creating an HTML 5 project from within NetBeans--formatting the project for both desktop and smartphone implementations. Ceccarelli noted that NetBeans 7.3 beta will be released later this week, and will include support for creating such HTML 5 project types. Gupta directed conference attendees to: http://glassfish.org/javaone2012 for everything about Java EE and GlassFish at JavaOne 2012.

    Read the article

  • 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*

    Read the article

  • WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 5: Service Client (more Flexibility with WSTrustChannelFactory)

    - by Your DisplayName here!
    See the previous posts first. WIF includes an API to manually request tokens from a token service. This gives you more control over the request and more flexibility since you can use your own token caching scheme instead of being bound to the channel object lifetime. The API is straightforward. You first request a token from the STS and then use that token to create a channel to the relying party service. I’d recommend using the WS-Trust bindings that ship with WIF to talk to ADFS 2 – they are pre-configured to match the binding configuration of the ADFS 2 endpoints. The following code requests a token for a WCF service from ADFS 2: private static SecurityToken GetToken() {     // Windows authentication over transport security     var factory = new WSTrustChannelFactory(         new WindowsWSTrustBinding(SecurityMode.Transport),         stsEndpoint);     factory.TrustVersion = TrustVersion.WSTrust13;       var rst = new RequestSecurityToken     {         RequestType = RequestTypes.Issue,         AppliesTo = new EndpointAddress(svcEndpoint),         KeyType = KeyTypes.Symmetric     };       var channel = factory.CreateChannel();     return channel.Issue(rst); } Afterwards, the returned token can be used to create a channel to the service. Again WIF has some helper methods here that make this very easy: private static void CallService(SecurityToken token) {     // create binding and turn off sessions     var binding = new WS2007FederationHttpBinding(         WSFederationHttpSecurityMode.TransportWithMessageCredential);     binding.Security.Message.EstablishSecurityContext = false;       // create factory and enable WIF plumbing     var factory = new ChannelFactory<IService>(binding, new EndpointAddress(svcEndpoint));     factory.ConfigureChannelFactory<IService>();       // turn off CardSpace - we already have the token     factory.Credentials.SupportInteractive = false;       var channel = factory.CreateChannelWithIssuedToken<IService>(token);       channel.GetClaims().ForEach(c =>         Console.WriteLine("{0}\n {1}\n  {2} ({3})\n",             c.ClaimType,             c.Value,             c.Issuer,             c.OriginalIssuer)); } Why is this approach more flexible? Well – some don’t like the configuration voodoo. That’s a valid reason for using the manual approach. You also get more control over the token request itself since you have full control over the RST message that gets send to the STS. One common parameter that you may want to set yourself is the appliesTo value. When you use the automatic token support in the WCF federation binding, the appliesTo is always the physical service address. This means in turn that this address will be used as the audience URI value in the SAML token. Well – this in turn means that when you have an application that consists of multiple services, you always have to configure all physical endpoint URLs in ADFS 2 and in the WIF configuration of the service(s). Having control over the appliesTo allows you to use more symbolic realm names, e.g. the base address or a completely logical name. Since the URL is never de-referenced you have some degree of freedom here. In the next post we will look at the necessary code to request multiple tokens in a call chain. This is a common scenario when you first have to acquire a token from an identity provider and have to send that on to a federation gateway or Resource STS. Stay tuned.

    Read the article

  • Oracle GoldenGate 12c - Leading Enterprise Replication

    - by Doug Reid
    Oracle GoldenGate 12c released  on October 17th and includes several new cutting edge features that firmly establishes GoldenGate's leader position in the data replication space.   In fact, this release more than doubles the performance of data delivery, supports Oracle's new multitenant database feature,  it's more secure, has more options for high availability, and has made great strides to simplify the configuration and deployment of the product.     Read through the press release if you haven't already and do not miss the quote from Cern's Eva Dafonte Perez, regarding Oracle GoldenGate 12c "….performs five times faster compared to previous GoldenGate versions and simplifies the management of a multi-tier environment" There are a variety of new and improved features in the Oracle GoldenGate 12c.  Here are the highlights: Optimized for Oracle Database 12c -  GoldenGate 12c is custom tailored to the unique capabilities of Oracle database 12c and out of the box GoldenGate 12c supports multitenant (pluggable database (PDB)) and non-consolidated deployments of Oracle Database 12c.   The naming convention used by database 12c is now in three parts (PDB-name, schema-name, and object name).  We have made changes to the GoldenGate capture process to support the new naming convention and streamlined the whole process so a single GoldenGate capture process is being used at the container level rather than at each individual PDB.  By having the capture process at the container level resource usage and the number of processes are reduced. To view a conceptual architecture diagram click here. Integrated Delivery for the Oracle Database - Leveraging a lightweight streaming API built exclusively for Oracle GoldenGate 12c, this process distributes load, auto tunes the degree of parallelism, scales better, and delivers blinding rates of changed data delivery to the Oracle database.  One of the goals for Oracle GoldenGate 12c was to reduce IT costs by simplifying the configuration and reduce the time to manage complex infrastructures.  In previous versions of Oracle GoldenGate, customers would split transaction loads by grouping tables into multiple different delivery processes (click here to view the previous method). Each delivery process executed independently and without any interaction or knowledge of other delivery processes.  This setup was complicated to configure and time consuming as the developer needed in-depth knowledge of the source and target schemas and the transaction profile. With GoldenGate 12c and Integrated Delivery we have made it easier to configure and faster to deploy.  To view a conceptual architecture diagram of integrated delivery click here Coordinated Delivery for Non-Oracle Databases - Coordinated Delivery orchestrates high-speed apply processes and simplifies the configuration of GoldenGate for non-Oracle targets. In Oracle GoldenGate 12c a single delivery process is used with multiple threads (click here) and key events, such as primary key updates, event markers, DDL, etc, are coordinated between the various threads to insure that the transactions are applied in the same sequence as they were captured, all while delivery improved performance.  Replication Between On-Premises and Cloud-Based systems. - The trend for business to utilize both on-premises and cloud-based systems is rising and businesses need to replicate data back and forth.   GoldenGate 12c can be configured in a variety of ways to provide real-time replication when unrestricted or restricted (limited ports or HTTP tunneling) networks are between on-premises and cloud-based systems.    Expanded Heterogeneity - It wouldn't be a GoldenGate release without new and improved platform support.   Release 1 includes support for MySQL 5.6 and Sybase 15.7.   Upcoming in the next release GoldenGate, support will be expanded for MS SQL Server, DB2, and Teradata. Tighter Security - Oracle GoldenGate 12c is integrated with the Oracle wallet to shield usernames and passwords using strong encryption and aliases.   Customers accustomed to using the Oracle Wallet with other Oracle products will instantly be familiar with how to use this great new feature Expanded Oracle Application and Technology Support -   GoldenGate can be used along with Oracle Coherence to enable real-time changed data feeds to the Coherence cache using Toplink and the Oracle GoldenGate JMS adapter.     Plus,  Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS) now offers a low downtime E-Business Suite platform and database migrations using GoldenGate as the enabling technology.  Keep tuned for more blogs on the new features and the upcoming launch webcast where we will go into these new features in more detail.   In the mean time make sure to read through our white paper "Oracle GoldenGate 12c Release 1 New Features Overview"

    Read the article

  • SOA 11g Technology Adapters – ECID Propagation

    - by Greg Mally
    Overview Many SOA Suite 11g deployments include the use of the technology adapters for various activities including integration with FTP, database, and files to name a few. Although the integrations with these adapters are easy and feature rich, there can be some challenges from the operations perspective. One of these challenges is how to correlate a logical business transaction across SOA component instances. This correlation is typically accomplished via the execution context ID (ECID), but we lose the ECID correlation when the business transaction spans technologies like FTP, database, and files. A new feature has been introduced in the Oracle adapter JCA framework to allow the propagation of the ECID. This feature is available in the forthcoming SOA Suite 11.1.1.7 (PS6). The basic concept of propagating the ECID is to identify somewhere in the payload of the message where the ECID can be stored. Then two Binding Properties, relating to the location of the ECID in the message, are added to either the Exposed Service (left-hand side of composite) or External Reference (right-hand side of composite). This will give the JCA framework enough information to either extract the ECID from or add the ECID to the message. In the scenario of extracting the ECID from the message, the ECID will be used for the new component instance. Where to Put the ECID When trying to determine where to store the ECID in the message, you basically have two options: Add a new optional element to your message schema. Leverage an existing element that is not used in your schema. The best scenario is that you are able to add the optional element to your message since trying to find an unused element will prove difficult in most situations. The schema will be holding the ECID value which looks something like the following: 11d1def534ea1be0:7ae4cac3:13b4455735c:-8000-00000000000002dc Configuring Composite Services/References Now that you have identified where you want the ECID to be stored in the message, the JCA framework needs to have this information as well. The two pieces of information that the framework needs relates to the message schema: The namespace for the element in the message. The XPath to the element in the message. To better understand this, let's look at an example for the following database table: When an Exposed Service is created via the Database Adapter Wizard in the composite, the following schema is created: For this example, the two Binding Properties we add to the ReadRow service in the composite are: <!-- Properties for the binding to propagate the ECID from the database table --> <property name="jca.ecid.nslist" type="xs:string" many="false">  xmlns:ns1="http://xmlns.oracle.com/pcbpel/adapter/db/top/ReadRow"</property> <property name="jca.ecid.xpath" type="xs:string" many="false">  /ns1:EcidPropagationCollection/ns1:EcidPropagation/ns1:ecid</property> Notice that the property called jca.ecid.nslist contains the targetNamespace defined in the schema and the property called jca.ecid.xpath contains the XPath statement to the element. The XPath statement also contains the appropriate namespace prefix (ns1) which is defined in the jca.ecid.nslist property. When the Database Adapter service reads a row from the database, it will retrieve the ECID value from the payload and remove the element from the payload. When the component instance is created, it will be associated with the retrieved ECID and the payload contains everything except the ECID element/value. The only time the ECID is visible is when it is stored safely in the resource technology like the database, a file, or a queue. Simple Database/File/JMS Example This section contains a simplified example of how the ECID can propagate through a database table, a file, and JMS queue. The composite for the example looks like the following: The flow of this example is as follows: Invoke database insert using the insertwithecidbpelprocess_client_ep Service. The InsertWithECIDBPELProcess adds a row to the database via the Database Adapter. The JCA Framework adds the ECID to the message prior to inserting. The ReadRow Service retrieves the record and the JCA Framework extracts the ECID from the message. The ECID element is removed from the message. An instance of ReadRowBPELProcess is created and it is associated with the retried ECID. The ReadRowBPELProcess now writes the record to the file system via the File Adapter. The JCA Framework adds the ECID to the message prior to writing the message to file. The ReadFile Service retrieves the record from the file system and the JCA Framework extracts the ECID from the message. The ECID element is removed from the message. An instance of ReadFileBPELProcess is created and it is associated with the retried ECID. The ReadFileBPELProcess now enqueues the message via the JMS Adapter. The JCA Framework adds the ECID to the message prior to enqueuing the message. The DequeueMessage Service retrieves the record and the JCA Framework extracts the ECID from the message. The ECID element is removed from the message. An instance of DequeueMessageBPELProcess is created and it is associated with the retried ECID. The logical flow ends. When viewing the Flow Trace in the Enterprise Manger, you will now see all the instances correlated via ECID: Please check back here when SOA Suite 11.1.1.7 is released for this example. With the example you can run it yourself and reinforce what has been shared in this blog via a hands-on experience. One final note: the contents of this blog may be included in the official SOA Suite 11.1.1.7 documentation, but you will still need to come here to get the example.

    Read the article

  • ASP.NET: Using pickup directory for outgoing e-mails

    - by DigiMortal
    Sending e-mails out from web applications is very common task. When we are working on or test our systems with real e-mail addresses we don’t want recipients to receive e-mails (specially if we are using some subset of real data9. In this posting I will show you how to make ASP.NET SMTP client to write e-mails to disc instead of sending them out. SMTP settings for web application I have seen many times the code where all SMTP information is kept in app settings just to read them in code and give to SMTP client. It is not necessary because we can define all these settings under system.web => mailsettings node. If you are using web.config to keep SMTP settings then all you have to do in your code is just to create SmtpClient with empty constructor. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); Empty constructor means that all settings are read from web.config file. What is pickup directory? If you want drastically raise e-mail throughput of your SMTP server then it is not very wise plan to communicate with it using SMTP protocol. it adds only additional overhead to your network and SMTP server. Okay, clients make connections, send messages out and it is also overhead we can avoid. If clients write their e-mails to some folder that SMTP server can access then SMTP server has e-mail forwarding as only resource-eager task to do. File operations are way faster than communication over SMTP protocol. The directory where clients write their e-mails as files is called pickup directory. By example, Exchange server has support for pickup directories. And as there are applications with a lot of users who want e-mail notifications then .NET SMTP client supports writing e-mails to pickup directory instead of sending them out. How to configure ASP.NET SMTP to use pickup directory? Let’s say, it is more than easy. It is very easy. This is all you need. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">       <specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="c:\temp\maildrop\"/>     </smtp>   </mailSettings> </system.net> Now make sure you don’t miss come points: Pickup directory must physically exist because it is not created automatically. IIS (or Cassini) must have write permissions to pickup directory. Go through your code and look for hardcoded SMTP settings. Also take a look at all places in your code where you send out e-mails that there are not some custom settings used for SMTP! Also don’t forget that your mails will be written now to pickup directory and they are not sent out to recipients anymore. Advanced scenario: configuring SMTP client in code In some advanced scenarios you may need to support multiple SMTP servers. If configuration is dynamic or it is not kept in web.config you need to initialize your SmtpClient in code. This is all you need to do. var smtpClient = new SmtpClient(); smtpClient.DeliveryMethod = SmtpDeliveryMethod.SpecifiedPickupDirectory; smtpClient.PickupDirectoryLocation = pickupFolder; Easy, isn’t it? i like when advanced scenarios end up with simple and elegant solutions but not with rocket science. Note for IIS SMTP service SMTP service of IIS is also able to use pickup directory. If you have set up IIS with SMTP service you can configure your ASP.NET application to use IIS pickup folder. In this case you have to use the following setting for delivery method. SmtpDeliveryMethod.PickupDirectoryFromIis You can set this setting also in web.config file. <system.net>   <mailSettings>     <smtp deliveryMethod="PickupDirectoryFromIis" />   </mailSettings> </system.net> Conclusion Who was still using different methods to avoid sending e-mails out in development or testing environment can now remove all the bad code from application and live on mail settings of ASP.NET. It is easy to configure and you have less code to support e-mails when you use built-in e-mail features wisely.

    Read the article

  • Coping with infrastructure upgrades

    - by Fatherjack
    A common topic for questions on SQL Server forums is how to plan and implement upgrades to SQL Server. Moving from old to new hardware or moving from one version of SQL Server to another. There are other circumstances where upgrades of other systems affect SQL Server DBAs. For example, where I work at the moment there is an Microsoft Exchange (email) server upgrade in progress. It it being handled by a different team so I’m not wholly sure on the details but we are in a situation where there are currently 2 Exchange email servers – the old one and the new one. Users mail boxes are being transferred in a planned process but as we approach the old server being turned off we have to also make sure that our SQL Servers get updated to use the new SMTP server for all of the SQL Agent notifications, SSIS packages etc. My servers have a number of profiles so that various jobs can send emails on behalf of various departments and different systems. This means there are lots of places that the old server name needs to be replaced by the new one. Anyone who has set up DBMail and enjoyed the click-tastic odyssey of screens to create Profiles and Accounts and so on and so forth ought to seek some professional help in my opinion. It’s a nightmare of back and forth settings changes and it stinks. I wasn’t looking forward to heading into this mess of a UI and changing the old Exchange server name for the new one on all my SQL Instances for all of the accounts I have set up. So I did what any Englishmen with a shed would do, I decided to take it apart and see if I can fix it another way. I took a guess that we are going to be working in MSDB and Books OnLine was remarkably helpful and amongst a lot of information told me about a couple of procedures that can be used to interrogate DBMail settings. USE [msdb] -- It's where all the good stuff is kept GO EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_profile_sp; EXEC dbo.sysmail_help_account_sp; Both of these procedures take optional parameters with the same name – ID and Name. If you provide an ID or a name then the results you get back are for that specific Profile or Account. Otherwise you get details of all Profiles and Accounts on the server you are connected to. As you can see (click for a bigger image), the Account has the SMTP server information in the servername column. We want to change that value to NewSMTP.Contoso.com. Now it appears that the procedure we are looking at gets it’s data from the sysmail_account and sysmail_server tables, you can get the results the stored procedure provides if you run the code below. SELECT [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] FROM dbo.sysmail_account AS sa; SELECT [account_id] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [credential_id] , [use_default_credentials] , [enable_ssl] , [flags] , [last_mod_datetime] , [last_mod_user] , [timeout] FROM dbo.sysmail_server AS sms Now, we have no real idea how these tables are linked and whether making an update direct to one or other of them is going to do what we want or whether it will entirely cripple our ability to send email from SQL Server so we wont touch those tables with any UPDATE TSQL. So, back to Books OnLine then and we find sysmail_update_account_sp. It’s exactly what we need. The examples in BOL take the form (as below) of having every parameter explicitly defined. Not wanting to totally obliterate the existing values by not passing values in all of the parameters I set to writing some code to gather the existing data from the tables and re-write the SMTP server name and then execute the resulting TSQL. IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#sysmailprofiles') IS NOT NULL DROP TABLE #sysmailprofiles GO CREATE TABLE #sysmailprofiles ( account_id INT , [name] VARCHAR(50) , [description] VARCHAR(500) , email_address VARCHAR(500) , display_name VARCHAR(500) , replyto_address VARCHAR(500) , servertype VARCHAR(10) , servername VARCHAR(100) , port INT , username VARCHAR(100) , use_default_credentials VARCHAR(1) , ENABLE_ssl VARCHAR(1) ) INSERT [#sysmailprofiles] ( [account_id] , [name] , [description] , [email_address] , [display_name] , [replyto_address] , [servertype] , [servername] , [port] , [username] , [use_default_credentials] , [ENABLE_ssl] ) EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_help_account_sp] DECLARE @TSQL NVARCHAR(1000) SELECT TOP 1 @TSQL = 'EXEC [dbo].[sysmail_update_account_sp] @account_id = ' + CAST([s].[account_id] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @account_name = ''' + [s].[name] + '''' + ', @email_address = N''' + [s].[email_address] + '''' + ', @display_name = N''' + [s].[display_name] + '''' + ', @replyto_address = N''' + s.replyto_address + '''' + ', @description = N''' + [s].[description] + '''' + ', @mailserver_name = ''NEWSMTP.contoso.com''' + +', @mailserver_type = ' + [s].[servertype] + ', @port = ' + CAST([s].[port] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ', @username = ' + COALESCE([s].[username], '''''') + ', @use_default_credentials =' + CAST(s.[use_default_credentials] AS VARCHAR(1)) + ', @enable_ssl =' + [s].[ENABLE_ssl] FROM [#sysmailprofiles] AS s WHERE [s].[servername] = 'SMTP.Contoso.com' SELECT @tsql EXEC [sys].[sp_executesql] @tsql This worked well for me and testing the email function EXEC dbo.sp_send_dbmail afterwards showed that the settings were indeed using our new Exchange server. It was only later in writing this blog that I tried running the sysmail_update_account_sp procedure with only the SMTP server name parameter value specified. Despite what Books OnLine might intimate, you can do this and only the values for parameters specified get changed. If a parameter is not specified in the execution of the procedure then the values remain unchanged. This renders most of the above script unnecessary as I could have simply specified the account_id that I want to amend and the new value for the parameter I want to update. EXEC sysmail_update_account_sp @account_id = 1, @mailserver_name = 'NEWSMTP.Contoso.com' This wasn’t going to be the main reason for this post, it was meant to describe how to capture values from a stored procedure and use them in dynamic TSQL but instead we are here and (re)learning the fact that Books Online is a little flawed in places. It is a fantastic resource for anyone working with SQL Server but the reader must adopt an enquiring frame of mind and use a little curiosity to try simple variations on examples to fully understand the code you are working with. I think the author(s) of this part of Books OnLine missed an opportunity to include a third example that had fewer than all parameters specified to give a lead to this method existing.

    Read the article

  • Disaster Recovery Discovery

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

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 606 607 608 609 610 611 612 613 614 615 616 617  | Next Page >